The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1835-12-08 00:00:00

he

DECEMBER 8, 1835

provocative of laughter. The modesty of DAVID is only
exceeded by his drollery. His is indeed a new light, for
It springs out of THOM, is confined to THOM, and expires
in Thom. His views are not only peculiar, they are also
sublimely original'—flashes of celestial fire from an in•
spired bosom, and that bosom belonging to one man,
who, with singular diffidenee, considers himself the only
true and authorised interpreter of the divine will. DA-
VID Tnom, of Bold-street Chapel ! why were MOSES,
the prophets, and the apostles, born before thee ? For
the sake of philosophy it should have been ruled other-
Vvise !

The poet of the fairies, our wayward shepherd of bor-
derland, the " gudeman of Ettrick," has, we grieve to
say, been gathered to his fathers; but he, in his inimita-
b!e Queen's Wake, tells us that—

" Little wee spirits of mortal birth
Come out of the wormholes of the earth."

and, if it be not profane, or calculated to bring the said
"spirits" into obloquy, we feel tempted to believe that
DAVID of .the above pamphlet is one of them who has
tome out of the " wormholes of the earth."

He does not tell us—cunning wee spirit I—under what
'flag he fights—he does not announce to what communion
he belongs—he does not exhibit his ticket as a licensed
carrier of notions in the mart of christianity—he uses a
.variety of general phrases, which pass current at a vari-
able value s but he condescends not to inform us whether
he is or inclines to be a papist—whether he was and is not
a Sco►ch presbyterian—whether he reads the real or the
fraudulently translated bible; on these important points
he says not one word; but it is impossible to read the
first half-dozen pages of his pamphlet without seeing, as
clearly as anything can he seen, that the author is one of
those limed birds convicted, of error, expelled from the
Church of Scotland, and placing himself, for protection,
and, if pot for fame at least for bread, under the free en-
sign of the socinians.

In this CharacterD4vin MOM', not exactly a PArt JoNas
isfar' as-talent and courage-go, but a sort of
cast from the pale of christianity, endeavours to write
thavvn the wisdom of ages, and prove that the holy scrip:
tures have been misunderstood, and the blessings of sal-
vation misinterpreted and misapplied, for the last eight-
een hundred.years, and that they never received any pro-
per, consistent, or spiritual elucidation until he DAVID
was born, and called, by r special POOVIDENCE, to let
loose their effulgence upon ? benighted world.
Some men, of more ardent temperament than we,
would call this impudence; some would even use harsher
language, and, in a deriding tone, sneer at the ;om-iit
lecturing the eagle; but we, or milder disposiiion, de-
precate all hard words applied to individuals. We have
our own soft way of meeting and silencing such persons.
The crow professes to be -musical—we ask him to sing.
DAVID professes to be a prophet and a teacher—we ask
him to preach. We judge of our bird by his notes.
Dawn thus opens his chanson ; and bear it, ye peo-
ple:—

" At a time when " the pulpit, drum ecclesiastic," is being
beat' throughout the land, and the various sects and denomi-
nations of protestants are called on by their respective leaders to
place themselves in battle array against the threatening pha-
lanx of the church of Rome, one, who for many years past has
kept himself aloof from the turmoils of religious strife, and who,
as a mere spectator of the game of words which theologians are
engaged in playing, is perhaps thereby Leiter qualified to judge
of its issue than the parties themselves, would desire to throw his
mite into the treasury of truth, in the shape of a few tbonAli;s
respecting the existing state of things.

"It is impossible for any well informed and discerning person
not to be ?ware, and for any candid person not to adroit, that
for the last twenty or thirty years popery has been ad rancing in
this country wills g‘yantic strides. The amazing number of cha-
Pels erected by the professors of the Roman Catholic faith, sod
the vast increase of their body which has taken place, within
the period just mentioned, put the fact beyond the possibi:;iyof
a doubt: In vain shall we • lay the flattering uni;:cn to our
souls,' and say, that this is to be accounted for chiEfly on the
ground of the ;lent imm'gratior of the lower dosses of
Irish, and ~he steadfast adherence -of them end their descend-
ants to' the religion of their forefathers. Statistical enquiries, if
duly prosecuted, would, I am convinced, chew, that, if some-
thing is to be alloWed for the influx of our Irish Roman Catho-
lic brethren,Zhe grand cause of the :n yueslion must be
sought for in circumstances connected with our r a‘ire pepulai;'on
itself."

Thinking reader ! does..not this-prove to your-entite
satisfaction that DAvin `From has come out of the
"wormholes of the earth," and that, as JAMES liouG
would have said, he is a very " wee spirit ?" He assumes
that poPery iti gaining- ground in these realms. lie st oh-
bornly:denieg that the increase of the Irish families lo-
cated in England and Ireland is the cause. He assetis,
lint shows no proof, statistical or otherwise, that ibis is
the fact. He adopts an error, and imagines he reasons
upon it.

Worm ! not poetically but in reality. We deny, and
will undertake to prove, not only the silliness, but the
absurdity and the downright disregard of truth which are
evinced in this his fundamental and elementary hypo-
thesis.

But before we do this let us look at the modest and nn-
presuming language of Davin. The defence now of-
fered for protestant doctrines he calls a "game of
words"! He presses into the 'controversy, in Ms own fa-
vour, all "well informed, discerning, and candid persons,"
and then he denies, in terms sufliciently peremptory nod
dogmatical, that ibis augmentation of papists in England
is caused by the influx of the Irish peasantry.
One denial is as good as anot her in the absence or evi-
dence, even although the first negative come from a pro-
phet and philosopher. Tie deny that popery is on the
increase either in England or Scotland, as far as the
native population of the two countries is concerned. The
desire to read, and the means of reading, are, we admit,
greatly increased. Information of a general kind is
more extended than it ever was; but surely a unitarian
not contend that extended reading and cheap publi-
cations are the auxiliaries of popery ? Popery has in-
creased in England, we. admit ; but how ? Simply be•
cause England, the richer country—the most prosperous
country in the world—attracts to her shores, by means of
steam navigation, millions of the most empoverished, de-
graded, ignorant, enslaved, and destitute race of human
beings that ever inhabited the face of the earth. The
increase of popery in England, from this-cause, is there-
fore easily explained. Within the last thirty or forty
years Ireland has deported some forty thousand of her
.:dative papists, in their native rags, to Liverpool ; as
.many to Glasgow ; ten thousand perhaps to Bristol ;
fifty thousand to Manchester as many more to the scat-
Airedlowns in the west of Scotland ; one hundred thou-'
sand.to London; and three hundred thousand at least to
the various manufacturing towns of England. Let us
look at this for a single moment.
For these nearly six hundred thousand of enslaved and
destitute people, the victims of popery, not more civil-
ized, though calling themselves christians, than the
aborigines of Van Dieman's Land, and certainly, in
point of morals, not so exalted as the red Indians of
America, whom ." respectable citizens" persecute and
extirpate by fire and sword,--for these people chapels
have to be built, masses have to be said, dog latin mut-
tered, priests provided, alms and gifts extorted, and the
stale mummery practiced as in the dark ages. But is
this any proof of the retrogradation of protestant prin-
cinles ? Where are the increased numbers of English
and Scotch papists ? Where is the link which connects
the bible-reading portion of our population with the po-
pish chain—with the thraldom of priest-craft, or the su-
perstitious ignorance of Irish papists ?
• Be it recollected, too, that the chapels to accommo-
date the Irish emigrants have for the most part been
built within the last twenty years. Half a century ago
it would have been, in many parts of the country, an
hazardous experiment to erect a mass house. The Irish
catholics had become numerous before they ventured to
build chapels; and as they have been tolerated without a
murmur during late years, they have made more rapid
pi'ogress in studding the country with convents and con-
secrated theatreS in the ratio of their increased popula-
tion.

But this. proves nothing against the fidelity, the con-
stancy, or the conviction of the protestants of Great Britain.
We thank GOD that apathy is not rebellion—that toleration
is not opposed to charity aril a sense of true religion !
We tolerate the Jews. Why not? They are JEHOVAH'S
Ciio(ell but erring people—they have the mark of confu-