The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-12-03 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

" Cali,thenes " and " R. C." postponed solely from want of
room. .....

.....
The remarks of " Viator" are certainly Fist, but we doubt the
expediency of alluding to the subject when the mischief is
dune.
if the I. tter of " A Phlanthropist" ever came to hand, it has
been a mfortunately mislatd.
Ve refer G. IL P. to an advertisement.
We regret exceedingly that, in consequence of the long reports
which we furnish to fay. we cane, t fiat room for the sting-
ing and well-written letter of " Fair Play." Could we have
inserted a tithe of the communications which we have re-
ceived ‘,n the subject of tlie unwarrantable conduct of our
stipendiary, it would afford him some idea of the indignation
which has been aroused in the town vy his vituperative lan-
guage. We may ~hFerve, ho a er. that meetings arc about
to be held in various w,,rds, to express the sentiments of the
town,

Our Contemprrary of the Albion is really shameless, in persist-
ing to impute a dispesitioo for " hole and corner work" to
the Watch Committee at their former meeting, with the full
explanation before him of their proceedings on Saturday, of
the circumstances under which our rep rter was refused ad-
mission. We t •Il him again, and we believe he knows it to be
a fact. that the Watch Committee would have adm ttcd re-
porters, had an application ceme before them.
The character in which Portia appears in court. in the " Mer-
chant of Venice," will he readily understood from a perusal
of the p ay. Impressed with the difficulties of the cause to be
tried before him, the Duke has sent for the opinion upon it of
a learned Doctor of Padua, Bellarmo. Portia, by his persua-
sion, appears in Bellarmo's stead recommended by him, in
• the character of a young legal stur;ent, as informed of his
views, and possessing besides, valuable le. al knowledge of
his own which may he made available. Portia, therefore, oc-
cupies merely the pos•tion which Bellarmo would have occu-
pied—one by whos opinion• upon a difficult and unpa alleled
Case, the Duke was willing to be guided. He had no jurisdic-
tion indepera'ient of the Duke.

EAR ttberpool

TUESDAY MORAING, DEC. 3, 1844.

Most firmly are we convinced that the great
'struggle of the coming session must he for the main-
tenance of the Protestantism of the British Con-
Otitution. It is in vain that we seek to hide from
Ourselves the fact that an inroad is about to he at-
tempted, by a professedly Protestant and Conserva-
tive Ministry, upon the principles of the Reforma-
tion—that Popery, conciliated, or attempted to he
conciliated, by repeals of the penal laws, by greater
toleration given to her professors, by the yielding up
Cif revenues left for Protestant purposes to aggres-
lion from every quarter, and even by direct encou-
ragement to the wrong, and obstacles thrown in the
way of the spread of right principles, is about to
have extended to her the helping hand of the state,
and to become an institution—not a tolerated error,
but an established and protected blot upon the face
qy British society. She is no longer to he merely
winked at in her steps—no longer to be merely per-
t/ii/led to darken the faith of millions with the
blighting shadow of her superstitions—but to be
the
erect, and aided in her fell attempts against
the liberties of Englishmen and of the truth which,
above all others, they have fought for and wor-
pped.
The Church of Rome is to be endowed! The
blackness of her darkness is to be burnished with
British gold. The money of the industrious Pro-
testant British people is to flow into her coffers, to
give splen our to her shrines, to add meretricious
adornment to her idolatrous ceremonies, to feed the
vanity and the rapacity of her domineering priest-
hood. And all this is to be done for conciliation's

wake; for expediency's sake ; in the hope of making
that priesthood, what it has never been from the first
hour of its blasphemous apostacy, a loyal and obe-
-dient body of men to a Protestant, or a truly Chris-
-Can government. Vain hope ! Fatal expectation !
faain in its very fallaciousness, and fatal—assuredly
tal—in its calamitous results to the liberties of the
people, by whose rulers it is attempted to be rea-
lised !

But that such an attempt will not he permitted
_to he made, without strenuous opposition from all
_faithful men, we feel assured, as we do that it will
recoil with fearful effect upon the heads of Sir R.
reel's ministry. Let us not be despairingly told of
The strength of that ministry to resist all interference
from without ! There never, in all previous history,

was a ministry strong enough to outrage with im-
• Tunity the feelings of a majority of the British peo-
ple. There never was a dynasty which succeeded
01 such an attempt. We may he sunk in mammon-
scarship ; we may be blinded with undue confidence
fti our rulers;
.we may be too much wrapped up in
reliance upon the elastic properties of our institu-
tions : but we are not beyond hope, we shall yet be
aroused when the Protestantism of the realm is
openly assailed. Truckling statesmen may imagine
Cast we shall " die and make no sign ;" that we shall
bow unresistingly before aggression from imagined
friends ; that we sh dl kiss the hand which smites us,
because such hand is one which we have clasped in
-fellowship': but truckling statesmen, even though
%bey may be such men, so valued, so respected, as
fire Sir Hobert .Peel and his Conservative collea-

gues, will discover their error when the day of trial
Mmes. The attempted outrage upon our Protes-
tant liberties cannot succeed, and will.not succeed.
Why are we thus confident ? It is because we
have amongst the clergy of our Church, despite of
recent wooings of Rome and her ceremonies, faith-
ful men who will not hesitate, at all sacrifices save
that of truth, to stand up in the van of the battle,
which we know to be approaching, and to encourage
al that struggle the laity, which looks up to them
for advice and support. We know that by those
faithful men the apost4cies of Sir Robert Peel, or
whatever other minister may abet them, will receive
prompt and indignant rebrohation. Nor are we
eithout present promise of such faithful teaching, or
evidence that it exists throughout the British com-
munity. We have before us a letter by the Rev.
W. Tatham, 8.D., the respected minister of a se-
cluded parish (Oswaldwistle, Lancashire), which
proclaims already the spirit in which the projected
ettack upon our Prote,tant privileges will be met,
end contains more than one passage of indignant re-
probation of its unprincipled nature, and more than
-ene warning of its calamitous effects. The following
extract we cannot resist the temptation of offering
to our readers :

" The religion of the established church is the religion
of the reformation or it is not ; if it be the religion of the

reformation, then is protestantism the religion of the
state ; and who that knows the Bible ran doubt that pro-
- .stantisni is the religion of God. What is the papacy ?
To call it a religion in any Christian sense, is an abuse of
the term—to call it a church is to give it a title which the
I9th ariicle of the established church declares to belong
`to a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure
Word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ad-
ministered,' not one of which requisites is possessed by
the papacy. It is in reality a political system with an
fieclesiastical mask, and has no pretension to be called a
religion, except so far as its ecclesiastical exterior con-
tying some of the worst corruptions of Christianity, which
It'brings to bear with fearful force on the natural weak-
ness of fallen humanity. Its objects are secular under a
ilpiritual cover. Its kingdom is of this world, and the
weapons of its war are when and where they could be
safely used, have ever been carnal and cruel ; the sword,
'tie rack, and the faggot. The path of its triumphs has
trver been marked by persecution and intolerance, and
;wherever it has risen in supremacy over the minds of men,
it has invariably revealed itself as `the woman drunk with
the blood of the saints.' Wherever she has been able to
embody her principles in acts, she has aimed at a com-
Otte ascendancy over the rights and liNerties of man;
for what is the history of Europe but a history of what
the papacy can effect to retard the eiviliza,ion of the hu-
man race—and how her religious corruptions have curdled
the very life-blood in the heart of Christendom ? Where-
over it has been planted and grown, everything around
Las withered but itself; like the tree described by Hum-
boldt, in the Andes, that flourishes most, when it has
rained by its roots, the soil from which it springs. Even
in the distant islands of the Pacific we have at this time
Qp in-lance of her aggressive policy,—and we see in the
46nflict there, on a small scale, the antagonism of protes-
tant truth and papal error. The history of her missions
it the history of her conquests.—the passion of Romanism
is the passion of praselytism,—in all lands, in all ages she
has acted on the principle of universal subjugation, and
wherever ele has succeeded, she has erected a tremendous
*Franny over mind and conscience, and exacted from her
sletims, a blind and implicit obedience to her authority
sid her laws." •
Such a church, then, it is which Sir Robert Peel
proposes to aggrandise l—a church whose objects
are secular, under an ecclesiastical mask, and which
A, at this moment, only seeking, in humble guise,
the secular aid Jf government, as the step to tyranny
over that government, and the subjugation of the
British people to its yoke. And it is to propitiate(!)
such a church that we seek—to propitiate a rapacity
g' power which in all ages of Christendom has shewn
itself inexhaustible ! Absurd folly ! wanton and
Indescribable madness !

The attempt is made, hfoawnevher, to justify, or at
least to palliate, the guilt o
has changed.cso In an age like
aggrandisement.
" Popery, it may be said,
ills it cannot but have recei,d
mldifieation from
ll'ili.,:,the increase of
the advanced state ' of useful know
atioen; or if not, it
tillucation, and the improvements of
the
VI ay be modified by a little more concil
sion. But popery has not changed, it cluinseta change;
udonees.
TAry secret of its power, of its exiatence,
littleness : the slightest transformation would be itrg
atruction. It is the apostacy of eighteen hundred years,
and a corruption of this duration cannot be cured is il
gradual way. The fallen angel may counterfeit, but be
Dever can become an angel of light. Lucifer once halm.
fax fallen never to 4:00. Whom Houle is to be deetrayed4