THE CHURCH OF EKGLAND. 243 



name we have not yet mentioned as among those to whom Dr. Chal- 

 mers, in his blind admiration of the Bench of Bishops, does an un- 

 pardonable injustice. And who does the reader suppose that clergy- 

 man to be ? He is none other than the worthy Doctor himself; for 

 no one, without question, since the appearance of Paley's Evidences, 

 has produced so masterly a work in defence of Christianity, as Dr. 

 Chalmers, which work, as most of our readers are aware, first ap- 

 peared in Brewster's Encyclopedia, but has been since published 

 and gone through many editions in a separate form. 



And yet the Doctor, and all the other persons whose names we 

 have mentioned or referred to, have not only not had the " advantages 

 of wealthy endowments/' but have not had that " leisure " which he 

 considers indispensable "to vindicate the substance of our faith;" 

 for such of them as were ministers of the Gospel had their weekly 

 pulpit labours to perform, and such of them as were not had the 

 duties of their several professions to attend to. 



Dr. Chalmers' discourse proceeds throughout on the assumption 

 that the " ponderousness" of a clergyman's condition, and the sound- 

 ness of his faith, are altogether dependent on the extent of his t( en- 

 dowments" and the amount of his " leisure." It follows, according 

 to the Rev. Gentleman's hypothesis, that the Archbishop of Canter- 

 bury, having at least fifty times as much " leisure and wealth" as the 

 average run of the inferior clergy, must be fifty times as erudite and 

 orthodox as any and every one of that body. Happy and admirable 

 Archbishop of Canterbury ! Ill-fated and " to be pitied" clergy ! 



Seriously, we had not believed, until the conviction was forced 

 upon us first by the testimony of our ears, and afterwards by that 

 of our eyes that Dr. Chalmers came under the category of those 

 referred to by Pope, when he says, 



" 'Tis from high life high characters are drawn, 

 A saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn," &c. 



Dr. Chalmers, in an after-part of his sermon, lays down the posi- 

 tion, that the bishops are the great bulwarks of Christianity. It were 

 a waste of time, and an implied censure on the understanding and in- 

 telligence of our readers, seriously and at any length to controvert 

 such an assumption. The Doctor, if he knows aught of public opi- 

 nion on the subject, either in or out of the religious world, must be 

 aware that that opinion is, that if Christianity had no better props 

 than the bishops to support her, she must long since have gone to the 

 wall. Positive good they, as a body, are perfectly innocent of ever 

 having done revealed religion. We wish we could acquit them of 

 having done it much actual mischief. The doctrines of many, and 

 the lives of still more of them, have, we apprehend, done more injury 

 to the cause of Christianity than all the assaults of Voltaire, Hume, 

 Gibbons, Paine, and the nameless lesser fry of avowed infidels. 



On the unseemly and anomalous spectacle of a clergyman of the 

 Church of Scotland going so far out of his way to become the indis- 

 criminate and zealous apologist of a church that differs in so many 

 respects, and on matters of so great importance, from his own ; on 

 this unsecurely and anomalous sight it is not necessary we should 



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