terborough; the style of which pleads, we think, very powerfully in favour of the writer. 'My Lord, 'Beccles, Suffolk, August 28th, 1821. • Section II.-Of Justification, in reference to its cause. 1. Does not the eleventh Article declare, that we are "justified by Faith only?" 2. Does not the expression "Faith only" derive additional strength from the negative expression in the same Article" and not for our own works?" 'I ought, in the first place, to apologize for delaying so long 3. to answer your lordship's letter: but the difficulty in which I was involved, by receiving another copy of your lordship's Questions, with positive directions to give short answers, may be sufficient to account for that delay. 'It is my sincere desire to meet your lordship's wishes, and to obey your lordship's directions in every particular; and 1 would therefore immediately have returned answers, without any "restrictions or modifications," to the Questions which your lordship has thought fit to send me, if, in so doing, I could have discharged the obligations of my conscience, by showing what my opinions really are. But it appears to me, that the Questions proposed to me by your lordship are so constructed as to elicit only two sets of opinions; and that by answering them in so concise a manner, I should be representing myself to your lordship as one who believes in either of two particular creeds, to neither of which I do really subscribe. For instance, to answer Question I. chap. ii. in the manner your lordship desires, I am reduced to the alternative of declaring, either that "mankind are a mass of mere corruption," which expresses more than I intend, or of leaving room for the inference, that they are only partially corrupt, which is opposed to the plainest declarations of the Homilies; such as these, "Man is altogether spotted and defiled" (Hom. on Nat.), "without a spark of goodness in him" (Serm. on Mis. of Man, &c.) Again, by answering the Questions comprised in the chapter on "Free Will," according to your lordship's directions, I am compelled to acknowledge either that man has such a share in the work of his own salvation as to exclude the sole agency of God, or that he has no share whatsoever; when the Homilies for Rogation Week and Whit-sunday positively declare, that God is the "only Worker," or, in other words, sole Agent; and at the same time assign to man a certain share in the work of his own salvation. In short, I could, with your lordship's permission, point out twenty Questions, involving doctrines of the utmost importance, which I am unable to answer, so as to convey my real sentiments, without more room for explanation than the printed sheet affords. 4. 5. 6. Does not therefore the eleventh Article exclude good works from all share in the office of Justifying? Or can we so construe the term "Faith" in that Article, as to make it include good works? Do not the twelfth and thirteenth Articles further exclude them, the one by asserting that good works follow after Justification, the other by maintaining that they cannot precede it? Can that, which never precedes an effect, be reckoned among the causes of that effect? Can we then, consistently with our Articles, reckon the performance of good works among the causes of Justification, whatever qualifying epithet be used with the term cause ?" We entirely deny that the Calvinistical clergy are bad members of their profession. We maintain that as many instances of good, serious, and pious menof persons zealously interesting themselves in the temporal and spiritual welfare of their parishioners are to be found among them, as among the clergy who put an opposite interpretation on the Articles. The Articles of Religion are older than Arminianism, eo nomine. The early reformers leant to Calvinism; and would, to a man, have answered the bishop's questions in a way which would have induced him to refuse them ordination and curacies; and those who drew up the Thirty-nine Articles, if they had not prudently avoided all precise interpretation of their creed on free-will, necessity, absolute decrees, original sin, reprobation and election, would have, in all probability, given an interpretation of them like that which the bishop considers as a disqualification for holy orders. Laud's Lambeth Articles were illegal, mischievous, and are generally condemned. The Irish In this view of the subject, therefore, and in the most delib- clergy, in 1641, drew up one hundred and four articles erate exercise of my judgment, I deem it indispensable to my as the creed of their church; and these are Calvinisacting with that candour and truth with which it is my wish tic, and not Arminian. They were approved and and duty to act, and with which I cannot but believe your lordship desires I should act, to state my opinions in that lan- signed by Usher, and never abjured by him; though guage which expresses them most fully, plainly and unreserv-dropt as a test or qualification. Usher was promoted edly. This I have endeavoured to do in the answers now in (even in the days of Arminianism) to bishoprics and the possession of your lordship. If any further explanation be archbishoprics-so little did a Calvinistic interpretarequired, I am most willing to give it, even to a minuteness of tion of the Articles in a man's breast, or even an opinion beyond what the Articles require. At the same time, avowal of Calvinism, beyond what was required by I would humbly and respectfully appeal to your lordship's the Articles, operate even then as a disqualification candour, whether it is not hard to demand my decided opinion for the cure of souls, or of any other office in the upon points which have been the themes of volumes; upon which the most pious and learned men of the church have con- church. Throughout Charles II. and William III.'s scientiously differed; and upon which the Articles in the judg- time, the best men and greatest names of the church ment of Bishop Burnet, have pronounced no definite sentence. not only allowed latitude in interpreting the Articles, To those Articles, my lord, I have already subscribed; and I but thought it would be wise to diminish their num am willing again to subscribe to every one of them, " in its ber, and render them more lax than they are; and be literal and grammatical sense," according to his majesty's de-it observed, that these latitudinarians leant to Armiclaration prefixed to them. I hope, therefore, in consideration of the above statement, that your lordship will not compel me, by the conciseness of my answers, to assent to the doctrines which I do not believe, or to expose myself to inferences which do not fairly and legitimately follow from my opinions. 'I am, my Lord, &c. &c.' 6 nianism rather than to high Calvinism; and thought, consequently, that the Articles, if objectionable at all, were exposed to the censure of being too Calvinistic,' rather than too Arminian. How preposterous, therefore, to twist them, and the subscription to them required by law, by the machinery of a long string of explanatory questions, into a barrier against Calvinists, and to give the Arminians a monopoly in the church! We are not much acquainted with the practices of courts of justice; but, if we remember right, when a Archbishop Wake, in 1716, after consulting all the man is going to be hanged, the judge lets him make bishops then attending Parliament, thought it incumhis defence in his own way, without complaining of bent on him to employ the authority which the ecclesi its length. We should think a Christian bishop might astical lau's then in force, and the custom and laws of be equally indulgent to a man who is going to be ruin- the realm vested in him,' and taking care that no uned. The answers are required to be clear, concise, worthy person might hereafter be admitted into the and correct-short, plain, and positive. In other sacred ministry of the church;' and he drew up twelve words, a poor curate, extremely agitated at the idea recommendations to the bishops of England, in which of losing his livelihood, is required to write with brev- he earnestly exhorts them not to ordain persons of ity and perspicuity on the following subjects:-Re- bad conduct or character, or incompetent learning; demption by Jesus Christ-Original Sin-Free Will- but he does not require from the candidates for holy Justification-Justification in reference to its causes- orders or preferment, any explanation whatever of the Justification in reference to the time when it takes Articles which they had signed. place-Everlasting salvation-Predestination-Regen- The correspondence of the same eminent prelate eration on the New Birth-Renovation, and the Holy Trinity. As a specimen of these questions, the answer to which is required to be so brief and clear, we shall insert the following quotation : with Professor Turretin, in 1718, and with Mr. Le Clerc and the pastors and professors of Geneva in 1719, printed in London. 1782, recommends union among Protestants, and the omission of controverted points in confessions of faith, as a means of obtaining | great objects of the bishop's apprehensions, he has his that union; and a constant reference to the practice of the Church of England is made in elucidation of the charity and wisdom of such policy. Speaking of men who act upon a contrary principle, he says, O quantum potuit insana φιλάντια ! These passages, we think, are conclusive evidence of the practice of the church till 1719. For Wake was not only at the time Archbishop of Canterbury, but both in his circular recommendations to the bishops of England, and in his correspondence with foreign churches, was acting in the capacity of metropolitan of the Anglican church. He, a man of prudence and learning, probably boasts to Protestant Europe, that his church does not exact, and that he de facto has never avowed, and never will, his opinions on those very points upon which Bishop Marsh obliges every poor curate to be explicit, upon pain of expulsion from the church. ecclesiastical courts, where regular process may bring the offender to punishment, and from whence there is an appeal to higher courts. This would be the fair thing to do. The curate and the bishop would be brought into the light of day, and subjected to the wholesome restraint of public opinion. His lordship boasts that he has excluded only two curates. So the Emperor of Hayti boasted that he had only cut off two persons' heads for disagreeable behaviour at his table. In spite of the paucity of the visitors executed, the example operated as a consider able impediment to conversation; and the intensity of the punishment was found to be a full compensation for its rarity. How many persons have been deprived of curaci s which they might have enjoyed but for the tenour of these interrogatories? How many respectable clergymen have been deprived of the assistance of curates connected with thein by blood, friendship, or it is clear, then, the practice was, to extract sub- doctrine, and compelled to choose persons, for no other scription and nothing else, as the test of orthodoxy-qualification than that they could pass through the eye to that Wake is an evidence. As far as he is autho- of the bishop's needle? Violent measures are not to rity on a point of opinion, it is his conviction that his be judged of merely by the number of times they have practice was wholesome, wise, and intended to pre- been resorted to, but by the terror, misery, and re serve peace in the church; that it would be wrong at straint which the severity is likely to have produced. least, if not illegal, to do otherwise; and that the ob- We never met with any style so entirely clear of all servance of this forbearance is the only method of redundant and vicious ornament, as that which the preventing schism. The Bishop of Peterborough, ecclesiastical Lord of Peterborough has adopted_tohowever, is of a different opinion; he is so thoroughly wards his clergy. It in fact, may be all reduced to convinced of the pernicious effects of Calvinistic doc- these few words- Reverend Sir, I shall do what I trines, that he does what no other bishop does, or please. Peterborough.'-Even in the House of Lords, ever did do, for their exclusion. This may be either he speaks what we must call very plain language. wise or injudicious, but it is at least zealous and bold; Among other things, he says, that the allegations of it is to encounter rebuke, and opposition, from a sense the petitions are false. Now, as every bishop is, be of duty. It is impossible to deny this merit to his sides his other qualities, a gentleman; and as the word lordship. And we have no doubt, that, in pursuance false is used only by laymen, who mean to hazard of the same theological gallantry, he is preparing a their lives by the expression; and as it cannot be supset of interrogatories for those clergymen who are posed that foul language is ever used because it can be presented to benefices in his diocese. The patron used with personal impunity, his lordship must, therewill have his action of Quare impedit, it is true; and fore, be intended to mean not false, but mistaken-not the judge and jury will decide whether the bishop has a wilful deviation from truth, but an accidental and the right of interrogation at all; and whether Calvin- unintended departure from it. istical answers to his interrogatories disqualify any man from holding preferment in the Church of England. If either of these points are given against the Bishop of Peterborough, he is in honour and conscience bound to give up his examination of curates. If Calvinistic ministers are, in the estimation of the bishops, so dangerous as curates, they are of course much more dangerous as rectors and vicars. He has as much right to examine one as the other. Why then does he pass over the greater danger, and guard against the less? Why does he not show his zeal when he would run some risk, and where the excluded person (if excluded unjustly) could appeal to the laws of his country? If his conduct is just and right, has he any thing to fear from that appeal? What should we say of a police officer who acted in all cases of petty larceny, where no opposition was made, and let off all persons guilty of felony who threatened to knock him down? If the bishop values his own character, he is bound to do less-or to do more. God send his choice may be right! The law, as it stands at present, certainly affords very unequal protection to rector and curate; but if the bishop will not act so as to improve the law, the law must be so changed as to improve the bishop; an action of Quare impedit must be given to the curate also-and then the fury of interrogation will be calmed. His lordship talks of the drudgery of wading through ten pages of answers to his eighty-seven questions. Who has occasioned this drudgery, but the person who means to be so much more active, useful, and im portant, than all other bishops, by proposing questions which nobody has thought to be necessary but him. self? But to be intolerably strict and harsh to a poor curate, who is trying to earn a morsel of hard bread, and then to complain of the drudgery of reading his answers, is much like knocking a man down with a bludgeon, and then abusing him for splashing you with his blood, and pestering you with his groans. It is quite monstrous, that a man who inflicts eighty seven new questions in theology upon his fellow-creatures, should talk of the drudgery of reading their answers. A curate-there is something which excites compas. sion in the very name of a curate!!! How any man of purple, palaces, and preferment, can let himself loose against this poor workingman of God, we are at a loss to conceive, a learned man in a hovel, with ser mons and saucepans, lexicons and bacon, Hebrew books and ragged children-good and patient-a com forter and a preacher-the first and purest pauper in the hamlet, and yet showing, that, in the midst of his worldly misery, he has the heart of a gentleman, and the spirit of a Christian, and the kindness of a pastor; and this man, though he has exercised the duties of a We are aware that the Bishop of Peterborough, in clergyman for twenty years though he has most amhis speech, disclaims the object of excluding the Calvi-ple testimonies of conduct from clergymen as respectnists by this system of interrogation. We shall take able as any bishop-though an archbishop add his no other notice of his disavowal, than expressing our name to the list of witnesses, is not good enough for sincere regret that he ever made it; but the question Bishop Marsh; but is pushed out in the street, with is not at all altered by the intention of the interrogator. his wife and children, and his little furniture, to sur Whether he aims at the Calvinists only, or includes render his honour, his faith, his conscience, and his them with other heterodox respondents-the fact is, learning-or to starve ! they are included in the proscription, and excluded from the church. The practical effect of the practice being, that men are driven out of the church who have as much right to exercise the duties of clergymen as the bishop himself. If heterodox opinions are the An obvious objection to these innovations is, that there can be no end to them. If eighty-seven questions are assumed to be necessary by one bishop, eight hundred may be considered as the minimum of inter rogation by another. When once the ancient faith marks of the church are lost sight of and despised, any opinions; insomuch that there is nothing to hinder the Armisled theologian may launch out on the boundless sea minian and the highest supralapsarian Calvinist from walking of polemical vexation. together in the Church of England and Ireland as friends and The Bishop of Peterborough is positve, that the Ar- brothers, if they both approve the discipline of the church, and minian interpretation of the articles is the right inter-proved; it has been submitted to; it has been in former both are willing to submit to it. Her discipline has been appretation, and that Calvinists should be excluded from times most ably and zealously defended by the highest suit; but the country gentlemen who are to hear these pralapsarian Calvinists. Such was the great Usher; such matters debated in the Lower House, are to remem- was Whitgift; such were many more, burning and shining ber, that other bishops have written upon these points lights of our church in her early days (when first she shook before the Bishop of Peterborough, and have arrived off the Papal tyranny), long since gone to the resting place at conclusions diametrically opposite. When curates of the spirits of the just.-Bishop HORSLEY'S Charges, p. 216.' are excluded because their answers are Calvinistical, a -pp. 25, 26. careless layman might imagine that this interpretation of the Articles had never been heard of before in the church-that it was a gross and palpable perversion of their sense, which had been scouted by all writers on church matters, from the day the Articles were promulgated, to this hour-that such an unheard of monster as a Calvinistical curate had never leaped over the pale before, and been detected browsing in the sacred pastures. The following is the testimony of Bishop Sherlock: "The church has left a latitude of sense to prevent schisms and breaches upon every different opinion. It is evident the Church of England has so done in some articles, which are most liable to the hottest disputes; which yet are penned with that temper as to be willingly subscribed by men of different apprehensions in those matters."-SHERLOCK's Defence of Stillingfleet's Unreasonableness of Separation. Bishop Cleaver, describing the difficulties attending so great an undertaking as the formation of a national creed, observes :— bread for an exposition of the Articles which such men So that these unhappy curates are turned out of their as Sherlock, Cleaver, and Horsley think may be fairly given of their meaning. We do not quote their authority to show that the right interpretation is decided, but that it is doubtful-that there is a balance of authorities-that the opinion which Bishop Marsh has punished with poverty and degradation, has been conlearned as himself. In fact, it is to us perfectly clear, sidered to be legitimate, by men at least as wise and that the Articles were originally framed to prevent the very practices which Bishop Marsh has used for their protection-they were purposely so worded, that Arminians and Calvinists could sign them without blame. They were intended to combine both these descriptions of Protestants, and were meant principally for a bulwark against the Catholics. 'Thus,' says Bishop Burnet, was the doctrine of the church cast into a short and plain form; in which they took to cut off the errors formerly introduced in the time of pocare both to establish the positive articles of religion, and pery, or of late broached by the Anabaptists and enthusiasts of Germany; avoiding the niceties of schoolmen, or the "These difficulties, however, do not seem to have dis-peremptoriness of the writers of controversy; leaving matters couraged the great leaders in this work from forming a de- that are more justly controvertible, a liberty to divines to folsign as wise as it was liberal, that of framing a confession, low their private opinions, without thereby disturbing the peace which, in the enumeration and method of its several arti- of the church.'-History of the Reformation, Book I. part ii. cles, should meet the approbation, and engage the consent, p. 168, folio edition. of the whole reformed world. The next authority is that of Fuller. "If upon trial, it was found that a comprehension so extensive could not be reduced to practice, still as large a comprehension as could be contrived, within the narrower lim- 'In the convocation now sitting, wherein Alexander Noits of the kingdom, became, for the same reasons which first wel, Dean of St. Paul's, was prolocutor, the ninth and-thirsuggested the idea, at once an object of prudence and duty, ty Articles were composed. For the main they agree with in the formation and government of the English church." those set forth in the reign or King Edward the Sixth, 'After dwelling on the means necessary to accomplish though in some particulars allowing more liberty to dissentthis object, the bishop proceeds to remark :-"Such evident-ing judgements. For instance, in this King's Articles it is ly appears to have been the origin, and such the actual com- said, that it is to be believed that Christ went down to hell plexion of the confession comprised in the Articles of our (to preach to the spirits there); which last clause is left out church; the true scope and design of which will not, I conceive, in these Articles, and men left to a latitude concerning the be correctly apprehended in any other view than that of one cause, time, and manner of his descent. drawn up and adjusted with an intention to comprehend the assent of all, rather than to exclude that of any who concurred in the necessity of a reformation. "The means of comprehension intended were, not any general ambiguity or equivocation of terms, but a prudent forbearance in all parties not to insist on the full extent of their opinions in matters not essential or fundamental; and in all cases to wave, as much as possible, tenets which might divide, where they wish to unite."-Remarks on the Design and Formation of the Articles of the Church of England, by WILLIAM, Lord Bishop of Bangor, 1802.'-pp.53-25. We will finish with Bishop Horsley. 'Hence some have unjustly taxed the composers for too mach favour extended in their large expressions, clean through the contexture of these Articles, which should have tied men's consciences up closer, in more strict and particularizing propositions, which indeed proceeded from their commendable moderation. Children's clothes ought to be made of the biggest, because afterwards their bodies will grow up to their garments. Thus the Articles of this English Protestant Church, in the infancy thereof, they thought good to draw up in general terms, foreseeing that posterity would grow up to fill the same: I mean these holy men did prudently prediscover, that difference in judgements would unavoidably happen in the church, and were loath to unchurch any, and drive them off from an ecclesiastical commumunion, for such petty differences, which made them pen the Articles in comprehensive words, to take in all who, differing in the branches, meet in the root of the same religion. 'It has been the fashion of late to talk about Arminianism as the system of the Church of England, and of Calvinism as something opposite to it, to which the church is hostile. That I may not be misunderstood in what I have stated, or Indeed most of them had formerly been sufferers themmay have occasion further to say upon this subject, I must selves, and cannot be said, in compiling these Articles (an here declare, that I use the words Arminianism and Calvin- acceptable service, no doubt,) to offer to God what cost ism in that restricted sense in which they are now general- them nothing, some having paid imprisonment, others exly taken, to denote the doctrinal part of each system, as un-ile, all losses in their estates, for this their experimental connected with the principles either of Arminians or Calvin- knowledge in religion, which made them the more merciful ists upon church discipline and church government. This and tender in stating those points, seeing such who thembeing premised, I assert, what I often have before asserted, selves have been most patient in bearing, will be most pitand by God's grace I will persist in the assertion to my dy-iful in burdening the consciences of others.'-See FULLER'S ing day, that so far is it from the truth that the Church of Church History, book ix. p. 72, folio edit, England is decidedly Armenian, and hostile to Calvinism, that the truth is this, that upon the principal points in dispute But this generous and pacific spirit gives no room between the Arminians and the Calvinists upon all the points for the display of zeal and theological learning. The of doctrine characteristic of the two sects, the Church of Eng- gate of admission has been left too widely open. I land maintains an absolute neutrality; her articles explicitly assert nothing but what is believed both by Arminians and by Calvinists. The Calvinists indeed hold some opinions relative to the same points, which the Church of England has not gone the length of asserting in her Articles; but neither has she gone the length of explicitly contradicting those may as well be without power at all, if I cannot force my opinions upon other people. What was purposely left indefinite, I must make definite and exclusive. Questions of contention and difference must be laid before the servants of the church, and nothing like neutrality in theological metaphysics allowed to the ministers of the Gospel. I come not to bring peace, &c. The bishop, however, seems to be quite satisfied with himself, when he states, that he has a right to do what he has done-just as if a man's character with his fellow-creatures depended upon legal rights alone, and not upon a discreet exercise of those rights. A man may persevere in doing what he has a right to do, till the chancellor shuts him up in Bedlam, or till the mob pelt him as he passes. It must be presumed, that all men whom the law has invested with rights, nature has invested with common sense, to use those rights. For these reasons, children have no rights till they have gained common sense, and old men have no rights after they lose their common sense. All men are at all times accountable to their fellow-creatures for the discreet exercise of every right they pos sess. Excluding Answer. say, that man has no Tenth Article. 'The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such,, that he cannot turn and strength and good works, to faith, and prepare himself, by his own natural calling upon God. Wherefore, we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us when we have that good will.' On Redemption, his lordship has the following question, Cap. 1st, Question 1st:-Did Christ die for all men, or did he die only for a chosen few? Excluding Answer. 'Christ did not die for a chosen few.' for all men, but only Part of Article Seventeenth. 'Predestination to life is the everlast ing purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) ho hath constantly decreed by his counsel, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ unto everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour. Now, whether these answers are right or wrong, we there appears to be some little colour in the language of the Articles for the errors of the respondent. It does not appear at first sight to be such a deviation from the plain, literal, and grammatical sense of the Articles, as to merit rapid and ignominious ejectment from the bosom of the church. Prelates are fond of talking of my see, my clergy, my diocese, as if these things belonged to them, as their pigs and dogs belonged to them. They forget that the clergy, the diocese, and the bishops themselves, all exist only for the public good; that the public are a third, and principal party in the whole concern. It is not simply the tormenting Bishop versus the tormented do not presume to decide; but we cannot help saying, Curate, but the public against the system of tormenting; as tending to bring scandal upon religion and religious men. By the late alteration of the laws, the labourers in the vineyard are given up to the power of the inspectors of the vineyard. If he has the meanness and malice to do so, an inspector may worry and plague to death any labourer against whom he may have conceived an antipathy. As often as such cases are detected, we believe they will meet, in either House of Parliament, with the severest reprehension. The noblemen and gentlemen of England will never allow their parish clergy to be treated with cruelty, injustice, and caprice, by men who were parish clergymen themselves yesterday, and who were trusted with power for very different purposes. The Bishop of Peterborough complains of the insolence of the answers made to him. This is certainly not true of Mr. Grimshawe, Mr. Neville, or of the author of the Appeal. They have answered his lordship with great manliness, but with perfect respect. Does the bishop expect that humble men, as learned as himself, are to be driven from their houses and homes by his new theology, and then to send him letters of thanks for the kicks and cuffs he has bestowed upon them? Men of very small incomes, be it known to his lordship, have very often very acute feelings; and a curate trod on feels a pang as great as when a bishop is refuted. We shall now give a specimen of some answers, which, we believe, would exclude a curate from the diocess of Peterborough, and contrast these answers with the articles of the church to which they refer. The 9th Article of the Church of England is upon Original Sin. Upon this point his lordship puts the following question: 'Did the Fall of Adam produce such an effect on his posterity, that mankind became thereby a mass of mere corruption, or of absolute and entire depravity? Or is the effect only such, that we are very far gone from original righteousness, and of our own nature inclined to evil?' Excluding Answer. "The fall of Adam produced such an effect on his poste rity, that mankind became thereby a mass of corruption, or of absolute and entire depravity.' The Ninth Article. 'Original sin standeth not in the fol- ruption of the nature of every man, that wrath and damnation.' The 9th Question, Cap. 3d, on Free Will, is as follows:-Is it not contrary to Scripture to say, that man has share in the work of his salvation? Now we have done with the bishop. We give him all he asks as to his legal right; and only contend, that he is acting a very indiscreet and injudicious part-fatal to his quiet, fatal to his reputation as a man of sense, blamed by ministers, blamed by all the Bench of Bishops, vexatious to the clergy, and highly injurious to the church. We mean no personal disrespect to the bishop; we are as ignorant of him as of his victims, We should have been heartily glad if the debate in Parliament had put an end to these blameable excesses; and our only object, in meddling with the question, is to restrain the arm of power within the limits of moderation and justice; one of the great objects which first led to the establishment of this Journal, and which, we hope, will always continue to characterize its efforts. 1. 2. BOTANY BAY. (EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1823.) MR. BIGGE'S Report is somewhat long, and a little clumsy; but it is altogether the production of an hon est, sensible, and respectable man, who has done his duty to the public, and justified the expense of his mission to the fifth or pickpocket quarter of the globe. What manner of man is Governor Macquarrie ?-is all that Mr. Bennet says of him in the House of Commons true? These are the questions which Lord Bathurst sent Mr. Bigge, and very properly sent him, 28,000 miles to answer. The answer is, that Governor Macquarrie is not a dishonest man, nor a jobber; but arbitrary, in many things scandalously negligent, very often wrong-headed, and, upon the whole, very defi cient in that good sense, and vigorous understanding, which his new and arduous situation so manifestly requires. Ornamental architecture in Botany Bay! How it could enter into the head of any human being to adorn public buildings at the Bay, or to aim at any other architectural purpose but the exclusion of wind and rain, we are utterly at a loss to conceive. Such an expense is not only lamentable for the waste of property it makes in the particular instance, but because it destroys that guarantee of sound sense which the government at home must require in those who preside over distant colonies. A man who thinks of pillars and pilasters, when half the colony are wet through for want of any covering at all, cannot be a wise or prudent person. He seems to be ignorant, that the prevention of rheumatism in all young colonies is a much more important object than the gratification of taste, or the display of skill. 'I suggested to Governor Macquarrie the expediency of stopping all work then in progress that was merely of an ornamental nature, and of postponing its execution till other more important buildings were finished. With this view it was that I recommended to the governor to stop the progress of a large church, the foundation of which had been laid previous to my arrival, and which, by the estimate of Mr. Greenway, the architect, would have required six years to complete. By a change that I recommended, and which the governor adopted, in the destination of the new court-house at Sydney, the accommodation of a new church is probably by this time secured. As I conceived that considerable advantage had been gained by inducing Governor Macquarrie to suspend the progress of the larger church, I did not deem it necessary to make any pointed objection to the addition of these ornamental parts of the smaller one; though I regretted to observe in this instance, as well as in those of the new stables at Sydney, the turnpikegate-house, and the new fountain there, as well as in the repairs of an old church at Paramatta, how much more the embellishment of these places had been considered by the governor than the real and pressing wants of the colony. The buildings that I had recommended to his early attention in Sydney, were, a new gaol, a school-house, and a market-house. The defects of the first of these buildings will be more particularly pointed out when I come to describe the buildings that have been erected in New South Wales. It is sufficient for me now to observe that they were striking, and of a nature not to be remedied by additions or repairs. The other two were in a state of absolute ruin; they were also of undeniable importance and necessity. Having left Sydney in the month of November, 1820, with these impressions, and with a belief that the suggestions I had made to Governor Macquarrie respecting them had been partly acted upon, and would continue to be so during my absence in Van Diemen's Land, it was not without much suprise and regret that I learnt, during my residence in that settlement, the resumption of the work at the large church in Sydney, and the steady continuation of the others that I had objected to, especially the governor's stables at Sydney. I felt the greater surprise in receiving the information respecting this last-named structure, during my absence in Van Diemen's Land, as the governor himself had, upon many occasions, expressed to me his own regret at having ever sanctioned it, and his consciousness of its extravagant dimensions and ostentatious character.'-Report, pp. 51, 52. and employed so numerous a gang of workinen, only because the inhabitants could not employ them, Mr. Bigge informs us, that their services would have been most acceptable to the colonists. Most of the settlers, at the time of Mr. Bigge's arrival, from repeated refusals and disappointments, had been so convinced had ceased to make application to the governor. Is of the impossibility of obtaining workmen, that they it to be believed, that a governor, placed over a land of convicts, and capable of guarding his limbs from any sudden collision with odometrous stones, or vertical posts of direction, should make no distinction between the simple convict and the double and treble convict-the man of three juries, who has three times appeared at the Bailey, trilarcenous-three times dri ven over the seas? 'I think it necessary to notice the want of attention that has prevailed, until a very late period, at Sydney, to the circumstances of those convicts who have been transported a second and a third time. Although the knowledge of these facts is transmitted in the hulk lists, or acquired without difficulty during the passage, it never has occurred to Governor Macquarrie or to the superintendents of convicts, to make any difference in the condition of these men, not even to disappoint the views that they may be supposed to have indulged by the success of a criminal enterprise in England, and by transferring the fruits of it to New South Wales. To accomplish this very simple but important object, nothing more was necessary than to consign these men to any situation rather than that which their friends had selected for them, and distinctly to declare in the presence of their comrades at the first muster on the ir arrival, that no consideration or favour would be shown to those who had violated the law a second time, and that the mitigation of their sentences must be indefinitely postponed.'-Report, p. 19. We were not a little amused at Governor Macquarrie's laureate-a regular Mr. Southey-who, upon the king's birth day, sings the praises of Governor Macquarrie. The case of this votary of Apollo and Mercury was a case for life; the offence a menacing epistle, or, as low people call it, a threatening letter. He has been pardoned, however-bursting his shackles, like Orpheus of old, with song and metre, and is well spoken of by Mr. Bigge, but no specimen of his poetry given. One of the best and most enlightened men in the settlement appears to be Mr. Marsden, a clergyman at Paramatta. Mr. Bennet represents him One of the great difficulties of Botany Bay is to find as a gentleman of great feeling, whose life is embitproper employment for the great mass of convicts who tered by the scenes of horror and vice it is his lot to are sent out. Governor Macquarrie selects all the witness at Paramatta. Indeed, he says of himself, best artisans, of every description, for the use of go- that, in consequence of these things, he does not envernment; and puts the poets, attorneys, and politici-joy one happy moment from the beginning to the end ans, up to auction. The evil consequences of this are of the week? This letter, at the time, produced a manifold. In the first place, from possessing so many very considerable sensation in this country. The idea of the best artificers, the governor is necessarily turn-of a man of refinement and feeling wearing away his ed into a builder; and immense drafts are drawn upon which he can apply no corrective is certainly a very life in the midst of scenes of crime and debauchery to the treasury at home, for buildings better adapted for Regent street than the Bay. In the next place, the melancholy and affecting picture; but there is no story, poor settler, finding that the convict attorney is very for the purposes of justice, to be turned to the other however elegant and eloqnent, which does not require, awkward at cutting timber, or catching kangaroos, soon returns him upon the hands of government, in a side, and viewed in reverse. The Rev. Mr. Marsden much worse plight than that in which he was received. (says Mr. Bigge), being himself accustomed to traffic Not only are governors thus debauched into useless in spirits, must necessarily feel displeased at having and expensive builders, but the colonists, who are so many public houses licensed in the neighbourhood. scheming and planning with all the activity of new -(p. 14.) settlers, cannot find workmen to execute their designs. 'As to Mr. Marsden's troubles of mind,' (says the governor,) ' and pathetic display of sensibility and humanity, they must be so deeply seated, and so far removed from the surface, as to escape all possible observation. His habits are those of a man for ever engaged in some active, animated pursuit. No His deportment is at all times that of a person the most gay man travels more from town to town, or from house to house. and happy. When I was honoured with his society, he was by far the most cheerful person I met in the colony. Where his hours of sorrow were spent, it is hard to divine; for the variety of his pursuits, both in his own concerns and those of others, is so extensive, in farming, grazing, manufactories, transactions, that, with his clerical duties, he seems, to use a common phrase, to have his hands full of work. And the parmind, is, besides, one for which few people here will give him ticular subject to which he imputes this extreme depression of much credit.'-Macquarrie's Letter to Lord Sidmouth, p. 18. so much feeling, that he has not a moment's happi There is certainly a wide difference between a man What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia ?-what event more awfully important to an English colony, than the erection of its first brewhouse?—and yet it required, in Van Dieman's Land, the greatest solicitation to the government, and all the influence of Mr. Bigge, to get it effected. The government, having obtained possession of the best workmen, keep them; their manumission is much more infrequent than that of the useless and unprofitable convicts; in other words, one man is punished for his skill, and another rewarded for his inutility. Guilty of being a locksmith-guilty of stone-masonry, or brick-making;-these are the second verdicts brought in, in New South Wales; and upon them the duration or mitigation of punishment awarded in the mother-of country. At the very period when the governor assured Lord Bathurst, in his despatches, that he kept * Vide Report, p. 146. |