the subject which I do not feel, nor presume apology necessary for availing myself of the privileges of a son, which are conferred upon us all at our ordination. The meanest of your children, however weakness may render his opinions contemptible, however youth may lower him in your estimation, however poverty and inferiority may render him in the eyes of the world despicable and insignificant, does, when he bows to address himself to your lordships in your high, and heavenly, and spiritual calling, advance a claim to your attention, as far above the claim of the richest and noblest of our land, as Heaven is above the most extensive estate on earth. It is not my wish to disguise the object of this Letter: I do not flatter myself that any protest by such a cypher as myself, will even shake your determination: a result against your lordships, if possible, must depend upon the exertions of others: but so impressed and convinced am I of the pernicious tendency of a Union of Benefices, which your lordships are contemplating, that my object is to place the measure in question before the Public; that they may be apprized of that tendency, and have opportunity of digesting its bearings before it is laid before Parliament; I might, it is true, easily have devised some other method in which to effect this object, but having been publicly charged (by one whose connection and coincidence of opinion with some of the dignified clergy of Durham and its chapter, are matters of public notoriety) with holding opinions "INCONSISTENT WITH THE PRINCIPLES OF A CLERGYMAN," and the tenure of preferment, I have adopted my present method, as being the least objectionable, because the most manly, honourable, and straightforward, as it will place me in a tangible form, if contrary to my knowledge, I am apostatizing from principle, or in * Remarks by the hon. A. Trevor, F.R.S.A. (formerly M.P. for Durham.) defending the vested interests of the Established Church and asserting the rights of the people, to resident incumbents, I am violating the discipline by which your lordships desire the presbytery to be suborned and silenced. If I am, in refusing to compliment away the interests of posterity, ignorantly offending against the rules of apostolic subordination, and your lordships think it due to your own dignity and superiority to avenge the violation, I am affording you an opportunity of exercising your power-so far am I," while clad in the garb of the “establishment, and in the enjoyment of a benefice which "it confers, from seeking in any way, the most distant, to "undermine its foundation :"*-and as I am approaching you as public ministers, on a public measure, in a public manner, as on my part there shall be (as touching ChurchReform there ever has been) an anxious endeavour to avoid private and personal allusions, allow me to submit my hope to your lordships, that the subject at issue MAY BE ENTERTAINED ON YOUR PARTS according to its own intrinsic importance, without any reference whatever to the insignificant station and abilities of him who has the honour of addressing you, and without any of that party feeling and prejudice which beget animosity, not improvement: for of this I feel fully sure, that if your lordships are desirous only of realizing improvement, the FREE DISCUSSION of every measure proposed to effect it, when unsullied (as I hope my Letter will be) by any intemperate language, or any irrelative personality, SHOULD BE esteemed advantageous rather than otherwise: for "where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety without counsel, purposes are disappointed; but in the multitude of counsellors they are established." : St. Paul enjoins "his own son in the faith," "not to be partaker * Remarks by the hon. A. Trevor, F.R.S.A. (formerly M.P. for Durham.) of other men's sin:" and St. James lays it down as a certainty that "to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." Taking these, then, as the broad principles of duty, I should feel that I was culpably resisting the strivings of conscience, if being a minister of the Church, the entail of whose estates your lordships propose to alter, I did not expose in what respect the measure your lordships have in preparation, appears to me contrary both to justice and honesty. "Keep thyself pure," said the great Gentile apostle to Timothy; in obedience then to him, all clergymen who regard the proposed Union of Benefices in the light in which it forces itself upon me, are bound to protest against it: for though the fault may originate in the head, yet if the heart consent, and the sin ensueth, the whole body is implicated in sin. In the fiftieth Psalm, it is among the crimes laid to the charge of the wicked by God, "when thou sawest a thief, then thou consentedst with him :" and it is become a proverb, "that silence gives consent:" how, then, shall we escape, if we tacitly suffer the encroachments, (I could justify a stronger term) which, nemine contradicente, your lordships are now compacted to attempt upon private property and parochial endowments? I do not mean to say that your lordships have not the power to carry the Union of Benefices into law: it is YOUR RIGHT that I QUESTION: and it is the possibility, yea, the probability of your being able to effect your plan, that renders it so dangerous. If the Public interest themselves on the subject, and your intended measure be seriously taken up and resisted by the laity, I know full well that it will vanish as smoke: and I pray to God to make this my humble endeavour efficient in rousing those honest and unequivocating energies which lie dormant in both Houses of Parliament: but sanguine as I am of the event, if the subject obtain an interest in their hearts, yet so divided into parties is the public on the subject of Church-Reform, and the future administration of its temporalities, so subdivided into fractions are those parties, that some in their fit of despondency and alarm, having made up their minds to await and share the horrors of revolution and the anarchy of irreligion, are content to leave the pilotage of the Church vessel entirely to your lordships; while others, (and a strong and wily faction they are) ready and active to accelerate any and every measure which is capable of being subsequently adduced as a precedent for interference with private property, and desirous above all other things to derive such precedent from the episcopacy, will aid, flatter, and encourage your lordships, till they can turn round to defy and despise you. Now least should fall into the snares which are set you for your destruction, and be caught by the bait, which though retaining the form of grain, is nothing but empty and delusive chaff, I am about to take liberty to speak boldly on this subject, as I feel convinced some ought to speak, throwing myself upon your lordships' kindness to judge leniently of the faulty form and manner which, accustomed only to exchange thoughts and opinions with equals and cotemporaries, I feel so ill qualified to maintain inoffensive towards superiors in talent, in rank, in age, and in experience. I have said that "some" ought to speak boldly on this question: because I do not wish to represent myself as an emissary irresistibly selected by any mysterious agency for this undertaking and because by no means wishing to assume a prominent part in the discussion of your intended measure, I have waited till the present time, in anxious hope, that some one more adequate to the task would have opened out the question. Disappointed, however, in that hope, and the time now being arrived when your lordships are proceeding to legislate upon the report of your commissioners, silence can no longer be observed without risking the credit and honesty of the present clergy, without sacrificing the provisions, heritage, and independence of the future church, and what will in these days weigh more than all, WITHOUT weakening securities now existing in defence of the property of the laity, and PERPETUATING the evil and scandal of PLURALITIES. Let me not be misunderstood: I do not mean to charge your lordships with a determination to brave all these consequences; it is because it seems that you are marching in the dark, that I beg permission to attempt to throw light in your way. Do your lordships feel affronted by my implying the possibility that any tendency of this union of benefices should have escaped your discovery? If such is the case, I am sorry to find you so unnecessarily captious: for I beg leave to remind you that the Bishop of Durham in his speech on the Irish Church Bill has given us occasion to know that the inferences of common sense are not always foreseen by talent and learning. "Before I enter upon this consideration of the bill, I have a debt of obligation to discharge to the noble Earl at the head of his Majesty's Government, for the gratifying manner in which he was pleased to advert to the recent establishment of an University in Durham, and to the part I had taken in carrying through parliament a bill to effect that purpose. I beg to assure the noble Earl that I fully appreciate the value of the encomiums he so obliging passed upon that design, and on the share I have had in promoting it. But I am under the necessity, at the same time, of endeavouring to remove what I conceive to be a misapprehension on the part of the noble Earl, as to the supposed sanction given by that proceeding to the principle of alienating the property of the church to other purposes than those for which it was originally bestowed. My lords, had I conceived it to have any such tendency, or that it could by possibility be adduced as a precedent for a measure like that now before us, I should most certainly have shrunk from having any concern in it, and should even now wish it undone, rather than that it should have given occasion to an inference of this kind. Indeed, I was greatly surprised on first hearing of its being |