NOTE M: p. 51.

FROM the very first establishment of our so-called Religious Newspapers, the thoughtful must have felt that there was something anomalous and incongruous in the very name of such a publication, and that it would be beset at every step by dangers, which nothing but mature Christian wisdom could avoid. For what has religion to do with novelties its goings forth are from eternity. Or how would it be possible for such a work to repress the noxious tendencies of party-spirit, and the personalities which that spirit always breeds? Under this persuasion, which was confirmed by whatever I saw, when such a newspaper happened to fall in my way, I always eschewed them: and when I was raised to an office, which brought me into intercourse with a larger body of my brother Clergy, and made it my duty to examine the influences whereby they are affected, I became more and more convinced of the wide-spreading mischief which these newspapers produce in our Church. Hence, year after year, in my Charges I have tried to warn the Clergy against their noxious influence, whereby all the worst evils of party-spirit are grievously fostered and fomented, and the religious controversies of the day are introduced in their most odious form into almost every religious family.

A number of these evils arise almost inevitably from the very nature of such publications, which exercise a sort of constraint on their editors to use those arts whereby an extensive immediate sale is to be secured. The shelter of anonymousness is a temptation to every one who bears ill-will against any of his brethren from whatsoever cause and assuredly there is no evidence that the odium theologicum in our days has abdicated the primacy which it has so long held. Even those, whose names would nullify their attacks, acquire the power of wounding, when they cast their poisoned darts out of secret lurking-places. The most ignorant, the most imbecile, the most rancorous may do this.

Everybody who feels jealousy, or spite, or dislike, or animosity, finds a ready vent for his feelings. Rumours taken up without examination, exaggerated, misrepresented, falsified, are thus circulated from house to house, and propagated from week to week, until they often become matter of common belief. The more injurious a story is to an adversary, the readier the editor will be to insert it, for the sake of seasoning what would otherwise be dull and vapid. The extent of his circulation depends in great measure on his fanning the prejudices of his readers. If he can but get them to look upon him as the champion of their cause, his sale is safe. In this, as in so many other cases, we see how far superior in wisdom the children of this world are to those who call themselves children of light. While all the respectable daily newspapers have attained to the honorable distinction of rejecting and excluding personalities, the religious newspapers will stoop into the gutter and wade through the common sewer, to pick up anything of the kind.

Of course the chief sufferers from these evils are the editors of the newspapers themselves. It soon becomes the one object of their aims to hunt out what will gratify the prepossessions and prejudices of their readers; and they turn away from whatever would offend or shake them. In so doing they grow more and more unscrupulous, and pamper themselves with the notion, that, in all their bitterness and malignity, they are contending for religious truth, and that, when they lie, they are lying for God. To this curse have inquisitions ever been doomed, that exercised by the press, like all others. Whether they torture men's limbs, or their words and acts, to extort their own conclusions from them, the motive is the same; and so is the excuse wherewith they harden and blind their consciences.

But the whole Church suffers likewise, in all her members. The readers of such papers are daily strengthened in the persuasion, which all are only too ready to embrace, that they, and they alone, are in possession of the whole truth, in its perfect purity and that all who differ from them are in errour, more or less perverting the truth, and endangering it. Hence they learn

to look on all who differ from them with distrust, with suspicion, with fear. Hence, instead of Christian unity, we have divisions, ever widening, ever multiplying; instead of that love and confidence which ought to prevail among brethren redeemed in Christ, jealousy, bitterness, hatred. Every one knows how dismally this picture has been verified by the condition of our Church during the last dozen years; and no one cause has done so much to increase and aggravate this evil, as the religious journals, by which the controversies of the day are made the subject of talk at every breakfast-table, so that people sip down selfgratulation on the purity of their own faith, and indignation. at the monstrous errours of their neighbours, along with their

tea.

Such being the fate of those who read these newspapers, learning their Gospel from them, they on the other hand, who are the objects of persecution and calumny first to the writers, and then to the mass of their readers, are thrust further and further into the opposite extreme. It is impossible to estimate how much was effected in this way toward driving our brethren, who have recently left us, into their schismatical acts. Week after week, and year after year, they were the objects of fierce invective, of reckless slander. Casual words were wrested against them; groundless rumours were continually repeated; evil constructions were put on all their actions: they found themselves living in an atmosphere of bitterness; and so they sickened and quitted it. Meanwhile the younger members of religious families, unable to partake in the prejudices of their parents, are struck with the incongruity between the antichristian spirit of these journals, and their religious professions, and thus are led to recoil into opposite opinions, or,-under the notion thus imprest upon them that religious professions are a mere pretense,-into open or secret infidelity.

It may be thought strange that so many persons, whose lives exhibit no slight tincture of Christian graces, should be found among the abetters of these favorite instruments of the arch διάβολος or traducer. But weak minds long to have their own

favorite notions supported by some outward authority. When the carnal heart has to renounce other vices, people will make a compromise with their consciences by indulging in bitterness and gossip against those whom they assume to be hostile to the faith. Religious busy bodies and tatlers had sprung up even in St Paul's time, so as to call for his reproof and warning; and such creatures multiply rapidly. When we are called to love our enemies, we stipulate that we may at least hate God's enemies, whom ere long we confound with our own; and it tickles our self-complacency to take rank among those who are striving against the corrupters of His truth. Still, may we not hope that the time will come, when all rightminded persons will feel ashamed of having such things as the common run of our religious newspapers on their table? It will be a blessed time for the peace of the Church, and for the growth of that Love which thinketh no evil.

With these convictions, which I have taken every opportunity of expressing, concerning the character of our religious newspapers, it could not surprise or trouble me, when I learnt from my friends some months since, that I had myself become an object of their vehement and continual attacks: nor did it surprise me, when, through the kindness of the same friends, supplying me with some samples of the attacks, I saw by what arts they were carried on. Nor should I have alluded to them even thus briefly, unless there were one fact, in which several persons of high character are implicated, and which has been made the subject of the strangest misrepresentations and the falsest insinuations for many weeks and months. These misrepresentations and insinuations have spread so widely, and have excited so much wonder among persons ignorant of the worthlessness of the channel which gave them currency, I have seen expressions of that wonder from Scotland, and even from America, and India,-that it seems right to set forth a simple statement of the facts from which these calumnies have been extorted, lest some ecclesiastical antiquary in after ages, some Mr Maitland in the twenty-fifth century, should draw forth this story from the dust and mould of an ancient

library, as a curious account of a formidable conspiracy against Christianity in the year 1849.

aware

They who have mixt at all in London Society, are that there are a number of dinner-clubs, establisht for the most part, I believe, by persons who have lived together intimately at college, and who, when the callings of practical life separate them, wish to have some stated occasion, when, circumstances permitting, they may meet their former friends. Most of these clubs live through a few years and die. Some of them attract a wider circle of members, and thus are prolonged, it may be, for more than a single generation. One establisht some forty years ago by a set of men at Christchurch, to which my eldest brother belonged, has since incorporated a large number of the persons most eminent in political life and in literature, and is as flourishing as ever at this day. At times these clubs may take some determinate party colouring, and may connect themselves with peculiar modes of opinion: but it is far better and wholesomer when this is not the case. The tendencies of practical life in England to produce all manner of narrow prejudices and partialities need to be counteracted; and we are mostly the wiser and the better for opportunities of meeting those who differ from us, and conversing with them amicably, at least if they are persons whom we can learn to think well of.

Now a club of this kind was establisht some twelve years ago by my friend Sterling. At first it consisted chiefly of his own personal friends. Among these I was of course included. In the month of June, 1838, he wrote to me, "I am trying to set up a club after the fashion of Johnson's to dine together in London once a month. My object is to be sure of finding several of my friends, when I may be occasionally in town, without having to hunt for them separately. I should wish to vote you in, and others living at a distance, so as to make the most of your occasional visits to London." In another letter, two months afterward, I find him saying, "I believe I have not written to you since our club dinner. We had agreed to revise the name and statutes on that occasion; and one of the changes was to call the club