the newly fortunate, if they appear in a manner no way assorted with those with whom they must associate, and over whom they must even exercise in some cases, something like an authority. What must they think of that body of teachers, if they see it in no part above the establishment of their domestic servants? If the poverty were voluntary, there might be some difference. Strong instances of self-denial operate powerfully on our minds; and a man who has no wants, has obtained great freedom, and firmness, and even dignity. But, as the mass of any description of men are but men, and their poverty cannot be voluntary, that disrespect which attends on all lay poverty, will not depart from the ecclesiastical. Our provident constitution has therefore taken care that those who are to instruct presumptuous ignorance, those who are to be censors over insolent vice, should neither incur their contempt, nor live upon their alms. Nor will it tempt the rich to a neglect of the true medicine of their minds. For those reasons, while we provide first, and with a parental solicitude, for the poor, we have not relegated religion, like something that we were ashamed to show, to obscure municipalities or rustic villages. No; we will have her to exalt her mitred front in Courts and Parliaments! We will have her mixed throughout the whole mass of life, and blended with all the classes of society. The people of England will shew to the haughty potentates of the world, and to their talking sophisters, that a free, a generous, and informed nation, honours the high magistrates of its Church;

that it will not suffer the insolence of wealth and titles, or any other species of proud pretension, to look down with scorn on what they look up to with reverence, nor presume to trample on that acquired personal nobility, which they intend always to be, and which often is, the fruit, not the reward, for what can be the reward, of learning, piety, and virtue? They can see, without pain or grudging, an Archbishop precede a Duke. They can see a Bishop of Durham, or a Bishop of Winchester, in possession of ten thousand pounds a-year; and cannot conceive why it is in worse hands than estates to the like amount in the hands of this Earl or that Squire! though it may be true that so many dogs and horses are not kept by the former, and fed with the victuals that ought to feed the children of the people. It is true, the whole Church revenue is not employed, and to every shilling, in charity, nor perhaps ought it, but something is generally so employed. It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free-will, even with some loss to the object; than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world, on the whole, will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist. * * In England, most of us conceive, that it is envy and malignity towards those who are the beginners of their own fortune, and not a love of the self-denial and mortification of the ancient Church, that makes some look askance at the distinctions, honours, and revenues, which, taken from no person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the peo

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ple of England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad; their tongue betrays them. Their language is the patois of fraud. ***

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With these ideas rooted in their minds, the Commons of Great Britain, in the national emergencies, will never seek their resource from the confiscation of the estates of the Church and the poor. Sacrilege and proscription are not among the ways and means of our Committee of Supply. The Jews in 'Change Alley have not yet dared to hint their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the See of Canterbury. I am not afraid that I shall be disavowed, when I assure you, that there is not one public man in this kingdom, whom you would wish to quote,-no, not one of any party or description, who does not reprobate the dishonest, perfidious, and cruel confiscation which the National Assembly has been compelled to make of that property which it was their first duty to protect. It is with the exultation of national pride that I tell you, that those among us who have wished to pledge the Societies of Paris in the cup of their abominations, have been disappointed. The robbery of your Church has proved a security to the possession of ours. It has roused the people. They see with horror and alarm that enormous and shameless act of proscription. It has opened, and will more and more open, their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind, and the narrow liberality of sentiment of insidious men, which, commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud, have ended in open violence and rapine. At home we behold simi

lar beginnings; we are on our guard against similar conclusions."

The vulgar argument of the Jacobins of England, who now issue their mandates to public council, is, that the Church estates are the property of the public; that the clergy are a race of public servants, who have no more interest in those estates than any other public servants; and that the Church property, as it cannot be handed down from father to son, is incapable of any transmission whatever. Yet, what can be more violent than the doctrine, or more vicious than its fallacy? If there is to be but one mode of the transmission of property, what becomes of the estates of the Corporations? what of the estates of the various Cities, Towns, and Public Institutions of the empire? They must be all confiscated, on the sweeping rule, that birth alone entitles to inheritance. But "the clergy are only public servants!" We ask, What analogy is there between a placeman, or a clerk in a Government-office, who may be dismissed at an hour's notice, according to the convenience of Government, and a minister of the Church, whom no man can deprive of his profession, his dignity, or his office, while his conduct continues to deserve it?-the holder, too, of an office, which the Government can neither enlarge nor diminish, multiply nor dispense with, which it neither superintends nor pays;-the receiver of an income, neither fixed as a salary, nor dependent as a donation, but arising from the land, regulated by law, moving along only with the movement of the great landed income of

the country, rising and falling only with the general flow and ebb of the national wealth, and claiming its rights of property by the same possession and prescription which establish the Peerage of England in their estates, with only the exception, that it was the great paramount proprietor, before their oldest names were in existence; that its property was the work of gift from the original lords of the soil, for the purposes of its pious functions, and not, like the majority of theirs, the produce of confiscation, of sanguinary violence, of the ruthless spoil of tyrants, and the scandalous venality of minions. That it was built up by hands virtuous and grateful, according to the virtue and gratitude of their time, and, at the worst, as the expiation of crime, or the efforts of man to atone for his injuries to the existing generation, by a tribute to the happiness and knowledge of all that were to come. Compared with this title, what were inheritances wrung from the ruin of families, in the hour of civil strife, or in the still more galling hour of despotic extortion, stained by the tears of the widows and orphans of brave men, fallen in the struggle against the oppressor,-testa · ments dipt in blood, and transmitted from scaffold to scaffold? The argument is an absurdity; and a guilty absurdity.

The pretence of the National Assembly, to making a provision for the clergy out of the National funds, is treated by Burke with the scorn due to its perfidy. "The confiscators, truly, have made some allowance to their victims from the scraps and fragments of their