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    which he is so enamoured that he see 3 in that of every other person nothing but defects and blemishes , it is so unpromising and defective , affecting merely the surface of the evils , and that with no great medical ing power , that we do not think ourselves authorized to occupy our readers' time and exhaust their patience with its details . The argument of Bishop Warburton in behalf of the episcopal establishment may with some effect be applied to the present condition of Ireland .

    If there be more than one religion in the state at the time of the union of church with the civil power , the largest of the religious societies ought to be the favoured body . It is fit it should be so , because the larger the religious society is , the more enabled it will be to answer th « ends of the alliance , as having the greatest number under its influence . Hence , he continues , we may see the reason and equity of the Episcopal Church ' s being the established church of England , and the Presbyterian the established church of Scotland : and from hence we may discover the duration of this alliance .

    " It is perpetual , but not irrevocable ; i . e . it subsists so long as the Church thereby established maintains its superiority of extent , which when it loses to any considerable degree , the union is dissolved . " Of the application of these remarks to England we offer nothing , though we may be warranted in thinking that the Church has not the majority over all the other religionists in this kingdom ; but to the Irish Church the Bishop ' s observations are destructive . There the majority is and always has been vastly in favour of the Catholics . Not more than one-seventh of the people of Ireland can be reckoned on the side of the Protestant Churchy and therefore

    the union between it and the government is , or ought speedily to be , *• dissolved . " Reading with discretion * Such is the heading given to an article in the Christian Observer , the tone of which reminds us of the story of the divine who never read " Dissenting divinity . " " Why , " asks the writer , " can we not be content to walk in the good old paths ? Why can we not be satisfied with the moderate and scriptural doctrines of the Church of England as stated in her homilies and beautifully developed in her services ? " "

    Beautifully developed" / What a taste must the man have who used such a term , with the Athanasian Creed and the indecencies of the marriage service staring him in the . face ! And then as to the old paths : what traveller would think of taking his place in a coach that , after the old fashion , dragged its way up and over the hill , instead of hastening through the valley ? Who would drive his carriage through mud and ruts a yard deep , rather than over the carpet-surface of a Macadamized road ? Let our Churchman pursue his old paths if he will ; by them , we doubt not , provided in his journey he begin not to beat the men-servants and maidens , and to eat and drink and be

    drunken , " he will at last arrive at the wished-for haven . Others , however , may choose a shorter and a cleaner road , and surely they are at least as reasonable as he . But what , we ask , would have been the reply of Jesus Christ to questions of this nature , supposing them to have been put by the Churchmen of his day to their misguided followers ? Certainly , he would have

    answered so as to intimate that a fair investigation of both sides of a question could lead to no great harno , and that the tenets of the Jewish Church were not of necessity the whole truth and nothing but the truth , because they were the ' * old paths" and the established religion of the country . ' Henceforth , however , reading with discretion must , according to our episcopal guides , be identical with reading the articles and the liturgy , et hoc genus omne . But

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    666 ' The Watchman .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1829, page 656, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2576/page/56/