motives, character and conduct; but all these private injuries, however great, seem very improperly brought forward on this occasion, having nothing to do with the libel alleged to be contained in the large hand-bill. The first notice of the intended meeting was expressed in the following terms.

Bethnal Green Bible Association.

"The First Annual Meeting of this Association will be held at the Parish Church of St. Matthew, Bethnal Green, on Thursday, November 14, 1815, at six o'clock in the evening precisely. George Byng, Esq M. P. President, in the Chair. The attendance of the labouring classes is earnestly requested."

After the Churchwarden received the Rector's very unexpected letter, at a late hour the evening before the meeting was appointed to be held, it was concluded for the purpose of avoiding contention," and "to prevent the Church from being" in the Rector's apprehension again turned into a Conventicle, "that the meeting should not be held in the Church, but in Gibraltar Chapel." Of this adjournment it was necessary to inform the public very promptly, and this was done by the publication of the notice sent you, consisting of a very few introductory lines, and of the Rector's Letter, that his parishioners might see for themselves the true character and spirit of his opposition to the Bible Association, as exhibited by himself. About three months after these events, the following advertisement was published, and posted up throughout the Parish, in vindication of the Rector's "character and conduct," while a prosecution was pending in the Court of King's Bench against a number of his other parishioners for having posted up and otherwise distributed" the said notice of the adjourned Bible meeting. Viz.

"I, the undersigned Hilkiah Samuel Young, of Church Street, in the Parish of St. Matthew, Bethnal Green, in the County of Middlesex, Undertaker, belonging to the Sect of Methodists, and lately one of the Committee of the Bible Association, having frequently calunniated the Rector of the said Parish, unjustly opposed him, and wilfully misrepresented his motives, character and conduct, and having posted up and otherwise distributed and circulated large hand-bills, charging the Rector with a design of attempting to prevent the circulation of the Holy Scriptures amongst his parishioners.' And we, James Christopher Sanders, of 157, Church

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Street, in the said Parish, Painter and Glazier; John Mouson, of Tyson Street, in the same Parish, Publican; John Pettit of

Bethnal Green Road, Watchmaker and Collector to the Auxiliary Bible Association; fered the said hand-bills to be posted up in having inadvertently and imprudently sufconspicuous parts of our respective dwellings, and believing the same to contain a most gross, false and malicious Libel, tend ing to lower the Rector in the estimation of his Parishioners, and to sow the seeds of dissension in the Parish, do, in this public manner, and with feelings of the deepest fence; humbly begging the Rector's parcontrition, express our sorrow for the of don for its commission, and earnestly requesting the peaceable and well-disposed part of the Parish to attribute this most shameful and wanton attack on the character of the Rector, to the instigation of men, who ought take this method to shew their enmity to the to have set us a better example, and who

Establishment.

The Rector with great lenity and forbearance, of which we are fully sensible, having instructed his solicitor to withhold prosecu tions against us, on the condition of our giving up the Author of the Libel, paying all expenses, and solemnly pledging ourselves. to behave towards the Rector in future

with the respect which we believe to be due to his character and conduct, and to avoid giving him any interruption in the do hereby authorize him to insert this pubfuture performance of his Sacred Duties, lic expression of our pardon and sorrow, in one or more of the daily papers, or to publish it in any other way which he may think advisable."

HILKIAH SAMUEL YOUNG,
JAMES CHRISTOPHER SANDERS,
JOHN MOUSON,
JOHN PETTIT,*

In the Times of Monday, Feb, 19, 1816, the above confession and exhortation was published, to which by way of preface, the following information was prefixed, concerning the hopeful progress of the prosecution, while it rests only on er parte evidence, and the no less philosophic "contemplation," of an indefinite number of "other prosecu tions," against "the remainder of the Offenders," as they are termed, previous to being heard in their own defence, and to the judgment of the law being pronounced. "We have been credibly informed (say the Editors of this paper) that the libel, to which the following apology refers, has been widely and industriously circulated in a very extensive and populous Parish, and that a grand jury of the County of Middlesex have within the last few days, found a true bill against eight of the offenders, and that other prosecutions are in contemplation against the remainder,"

Such are the conditions on which the Rector is desirous it should be publicly known, he forbears to prosecute these persons, who not only express their deep contrition and sorrow for their offence, but earnestly request their "well disposed" neighbours to attribute the supposed libel, not to "the author," whom they engage to give up to the vengeance of the law, which they were themselves so terrified at and so anxious to escape, but "to the instigation of men" who it seems ought to have set them "a better example." Who these men are does not expressly appear, but the Rector's letter, and this intended justification of his conduct, (which does not even once mention his letter) are both strongly marked with hostility to the Bible Association. It is therefore probable, at least, that its ostensible agents are the persons described therein as showing their enmity to the Establish ment, by promoting the professed object of the society, the distribution of the Scriptures alone, "without note

46

or comment."

I shall not presume to anticipate what the judgment of the Court of King's Bench may be on the case, after its real merits shall be sifted to the bottom, and fully investigated; but the article I sent you before on this subject having been inserted in your journal, its well-established character for impartiality appears to me to require I should also send you copies of the above documents. Patiently and respectfully waiting the result of the Rector's appeal to the law of the land, I remain, sincerely yours,

PHILEMON.

Field of Waterloo.

mind as the drum's discordant sound affected the poet of Amwell. To me it talks of ravaged plains, And burning towns and ruined swains, And mangled limbs, and dying groans, And widows' tears, and Orphans' moans.

I am thus in some danger of estimating in the lowest moral rank of our species, however exalted by fortune, the mere soldier, who gives his nights and days to cultivate the science of human destruction, and whose virtus can only be translated valour.

Whether the great troubler of Europe," whose blood-stained laurels

were too often drenched with widows'

tears, po sess no other claim to distinction, let those who have considered the events of the last twenty years, or studied the Code Napoleon, determine.

Your correspondent must allow me to suspect that he was deserted by his usual and justly acknowledged candour when he adopted this favourite com mon-place of priests and courtiers. The Pope and his Jesuits, the beloved Ferdinand and his Inquisitors, and especially those fruges consumere nati, the family of Bourbon, will readily agree that Napoleon was the great troubler of Europe. Yet the lately persecuted Protestants, whose protection had been extensive as his power, and the French peasantry who, under the Imperial Government, had gradually acquired the comforts of independence, may be justly expected to demur. Nor will an impartial historian fail to discover some good reasons for suspecting that the wisdom rather than the violence of Napoleon, excited the late coalition of Europe.

When, in the revolution of ages, a great man rises from among the multitude and invests himself with power, he naturally excites the antipathy of his contemporaries, who are only great Kings and great Emperors, waxen images of souls," as a poet expresses it, who must be conscious that to the mere accident of birth they owe all their distinction from the cominon crowd.

Your correspondent ascribes to the Duke of Wellington a sort of sacerdotal character, under which he was employed as priest, I suppose of Mars or Bellona, to "6 'consecrate this same

post of Waterloo by a signal victory." Here I cannot help recollecting Hymn for the consecration of Colours," which was printed, and came into my

hands twenty years ago, and of which this first stanza runs in my head.

All people that on earth do dwell,
Full sweetly let us sing
The praises of the God of War,
For 'tis a comely thing.

As to the Dutch Deputies who forbad the Duke of Marlborough thus to consecrate the Field of Waterloo, their decision might, after all, be correct, considering the Duke of Wellington's acknowledged hair-breadth escape from a ruinous defeat by the unexpected attainment of a "signal victory."

I cannot take leave of your correspondent without giving full credit to his love of peace, and joining him in a wish for "permanent tranquillity," a good for which we can scarcely venture to hope. We differ only from the different aspects under which we have viewed our subject. He appears to have imbibed some portion of the enthusiasm produced by the late hey day of victory, and can contemplate the pomp and circumstances of glorious war," while I have indulged the sober sadness produced by beholding the monster stripped of the specious habit which he wears in the masquerade of civilized, and especially of fashionable life, and appearing in native deformity, dreary and disgusting. PACIFICUS.

On Poetical Scepticism. No. II.*

SIR,

THERE is no on the HERE is no subject on which poetical sceptic more entirely coincide, than that of mystery. It cannot be denied that there is something conge. nial to the human mind in the contemplation of objects which it sees but in part; and this arises from its perpetual love of action, and its partiality for its own creations. When a magnificent object is placed before our eyes, in its full proportions, little more is left us but to gaze and admire. But when a gloom is thrown round it which half conceals it from actual observation, our higher faculties are called into exercise; imagination fills up the void; a thousand fantasies occupy the place of a single truth, which we delight in the more because they are our own. The love of mystery springs, therefore, not from humility

* See p. 157.

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but from pride-not from a desire to submit to superior wisdom but a craving after opportunity to exert our own creative powers. For this the spirit of inquiry has been too often resigned; for it is always easier to feel than to think, to wonder than to examine. The love of mystery, so far as it excludes reason, is a sensual gratification, though of a noble kind; for it is the the triumph of the sensitive over the absorption of perception in sensation;

intellectual faculties. Still it must

In the notes to the last edition of his Poems Mr. Wordsworth has preferred a charge against Unitarians, which comes from too high a source to be passed over in silence. After observing, that the readers of religious poetry are liable to receive a strong prejudice in favour of an author whose sentiments coincide with theirs, and as violent an aversion to one who maintains ditferent opinions, he thus proceeds: "To these excesses, they, who from their professions, ought to be most guarded against them, are perhaps the most liable; I mean those sects whose religion being from the calculating understanding, is cold and formal. For when Christianity, the religion of humility, is founded upon the proudest quality of our na ture, what can be expected but contradictions? Accordingly believers of this cast are, at one time, contemptuous; at another, being troubled as they are and must be with inward misgivings, they are jealous and suspicious ;-- and, at all seasons, they are under temptation to supply, by the heat with which they defend their tenets, the animation which is wanting to the constitution of the religion itself." Here all the misgivings, imputed to Unitarians, are traced to the jealousies, centempts, and contradictions circumstance of their founding a religion of humility on the "calculating understanding," "the proudest quality of our nature." But how can any quality of our nature be termed and though it may be mingled with others proud? Pride is a distinct quality of itself, in operation, cannot enter into their substance. Besides, reason is a power and not a quality; it may possibly produce pride, but can no more be proud than sight, hear ing or taste. All that can be said of it, even in correct language, is, that it has a tendercy to make those proud who take most pleasure in its exercise. But is not the imagipation liable to the same charge? Nay, does it not lead more naturally to self-admiration when it enables its possessors to frame worlds of their own, to create the regions they are to revel in, to rise in the kindling majesty of their own conceptions? Truth, which is the object of the reasoner, exists independently of him, and he is only anxious to find and to enjoy it. The materials of the poet are stored within himself, and

be admitted, in the present condition of man, to be the source of many pure and elevated pleasures, and linked to some of the most divine speculations which we are capable of indulging. My design is, therefore, to inquire what advantage the Calvinist possesses by reason of his belief in the TRINITY, over those who maintain the proper unity of the Great First Cause of all things.

A mystery, in order to excite lofty emotions of any kind, must not be entirely a secret. It must not be "invisible," but "dimly seen." It must afford the materials, however visionary and slight, which fancy may mould into images beautiful or sublime. The joy it excites consists not in the absence but in the plenitude of ideas. We must, therefore, be able to form some conception respecting the objects of our wonder. A mere Gordian knot which we cannot untie; an enigma we cannot solve; a direct contradiction in terms which we are unable either to understand or explain, can never become the spring of imaginations either tremendous or delightful. If, for instance, a person ignorant of Algebra is informed that there are quantities less than nothing, he will derive nothing but perplexity from the information, though he may firmly

So

his triumph is peculiarly his own. The lore of fame is confessedly the passion he most ardently cherishes. Surely, then, the imagination is, to speak in Mr. W's. language, as proud a quality as the understanding And, on what is his hypothesis founded but the very reason which the author endeavours to condemn ? What does the word "accordingly" imply, but the deduction of a conclusion from its premises : that here is a paragraph written in defence of humility, "founded upon the proudest quality of our nature;" and, in such a case, what can be expected but contradictions?" It is almost needless to observe, that these observations leave untouched the merits of Mr. W's. poetry. Here indeed he is far above my feeble praise. In acute sensibility, in the philosophy of nature, in the delineation of all that is gentle in man, and in the power of rendering earthly images ethereal, I believe him to be surpassed by none in ancient or modern times. But I would confine poetry and reason to their respective uses. I would no more allow the former to usurp the place of the latter, than I would suffer a spirit of conceited criticism to deprive me of my purest enjoy

ments,

believe it on the credit of the speaker. It is just so with the believer in the Trinity. He says his creed is that one is three and that three are one; but has he the most faint idea of the wonders he receives? Does any dim vision of something unearthly, in which there is a distinction of persons combined with a unity of substance, swim before the eye of his fancy? No. Let him work up his powers of imagination to the utmost, he will still be able only to conceive of three separate beings, in which there is no mystery at all. All the wonder consists in their union, and of that he can imagine nothing. His idea must be either of three divine substances distinctly, or of one alone. In the latter case, he can have no associations, which the Unitarian does not enjoy; and, in the former, as plurality is his only advantage, he is far below the most ignorant inhabitants of Rome. All that is truly sublime in his creed arises from a contemplation of the Divine essence as embodied in a single form. His peculiar belief amounts only to this, that there is something about which he can believe nothing. He may use the term Trinity, or any other phrase of human invention, but it must come to this after all. He is precisely in the condition of a person unacquainted with the laws of nature, who should be told that there is a mysterious princi ple called gravitation, in which he must believe; but whose ideas respecting it, supposing him to give credit to his informer, would probably be as accurate as that of the blind man, who heard that scarlet was a brilliant colour, and then conjectured it must resemble the sound of a trumpet. A Trinitarian falls short even of this conception. He can surely derive no sublime ideas from belief in his favourite mystery, since it does not afford him even the dimmest image of the object he supposes it to conceal.

When the poetical champion of orthodoxy asserts that there is something more lofty in the contemplation of the Divine Being as a triune substance than as properly one, inasmuch as the former is more mysterious, he must admit that, in the latter, a degree of possible sublimity is wanting. No object can derive any additional gran, deur from mystery unless it is imper fect. There must be a power in imagination to make it more awful than

it is in itself, or it must seem mightier in proportion as it becomes visible. When the object is so sublime as to transcend all human conception, the clearer we behold it, the more must we be filled with wonder and every power be called into exercise to comprehend, to admire, and to enjoy. This has been strikingly the case with the discoveries made by human skill respecting the systems that encircle us. When the Chaldean shepherd contemplated the glory of the starry heavens, he might have trembled at any attempt to investigate the qualities of those immortal lights whose mystery seemed to add to their lustre, and have apprehended that when truth was forced on him his loveliest fancies must vanish. And yet, though such a feeling would have been in perfect sympathy with that of a poetical believer, what shall we say of it now when science has given us a nearer view of these objects of mysterious wonder? Are our conceptions respecting them less majestic because instead of lamps fixed in the heavens for our delight we find them to be the centres of mighty systemssuns which give light to unnumbered worlds-and in their turn catch a distant gleam from ours? Has the region of imagination been contracted, as reason has drawn aside the veil from nature's perpetual miracles? On the contrary, the more we have known, the more, we have been convinced, there is yet to know. Reason has gone forth as the pioneer of imagination into untried regions; and whilst she has found some resting places on which she has kindled beacons that can never perish, she has formed them not only to cheer and direct her followers, but to shed a dim and religious light over a boundless space fitted for the dwelling of her immortal sister. And if this be true as it respects the creation of God, the heavens that are but "his footstool," and the "clouds and darkness that are about his throne," how much more truly may it be urged of the Deity himself! An increase of knowledge respecting him must at once expand and fill all the capacities of the mind; make every faculty overflow with intelligence, every passion still with wonder, and every pulse beat with joy. Yet the Trinitarian promises much sublime contemplation from a mystery respecting his nature, which in so far as it operates at all, must

219

And then he

conceal him from us. offers us in exchange for a glimpse of divine perfections, the images which, in the midst of darkness we may ourselves be able to create !

It is singular that those who speak of mysteries as the glory of their religion, represent them as intended to vanish in heaven. A state of knowledge is there anticipated as a state of bliss, and yet here there must be no joy but that of darkness. Surely we are at liberty to suppose that the nearer we can approach the perfections of our future being, the longer perspective we can attain of the regions beyond the grave, the clearer glimpses we catch of the beatitudes of eternity, the better we shall be prepared to enjoy them. The more we see of our divine Father" as he is," the more shall we "be like him." And yet we are told that "a religion without its mysteries would be a temple without its God." As a system then which leaves us most in the dark is most divine-has most of God in it-how preferable was the faith of the Jews to Christianity, and the Grecian mythologies to both of them! On the contrary, mystery is no more a part of religion than ignorance is of knowledge. The object of the former in divine, is the same as that of the latter in human things; to disclose what before was hidden. No uncertainty can exist now which did not exist always; revelation, indeed, when it made all manifest which it is essential to know, enabled us to perceive that we had much yet to discover. The mystery remains, no doubt for wise purposes, but not in conse quence of our faith. The Calvinist, like the " poor Indian," sees God in clouds ;" but with this difference: the former traces him as far as he is able in the most ethereal of his works, the latter enshrouds him in darkness which he has himself created.

After all, if there is any thing pleasing in the contemplation of mystery, there are surely objects enough that we see but dimly without obscuring the light which heaven has given us. In the infancy of an eternal being we must necessarily be surrounded with wonders. We feel mighty stirrings within us, like the motions of Homer's Cyclop in his cavern, gigantic though in darkness. Possessed with desires which nothing visible can satisfy, we are elevated by aspirations after ima