Monthly Review of Literature. 309 



is called ' passive resistance/ No sane man would brave the perils of a 

 victory. He can only be reluctantly submissive, but he must submit. 



" Agitation can never relieve the wretched peasant from his burden, but it 

 may deprive him of all hope of alleviation. It must exclude capital, and 

 forbid the enterprise which would offer employment and wages to men who 

 are unwilling to be idle, and who are perishing from want. Mr. Crawford is 

 not the man to hold misery in derision, and to tell the poor creature who has 

 not a morsel of bread, that some gentlemen in the Corn Exchange are fighting 

 with shadows upon his behalf. He will not advise him to ' abide the pelting* 

 of a tempest, because it may blow a feather for him to stick in his cap, or 

 desire him, when jaded and exhausted with toil, and hunger, and sorrow, to 

 run after bubbles by way of recreation. 



" Mr. Crawford will not become a party to this cruel, to this wicked impos- 

 ture. He is utterly disqualified for such work ; he has neither the heart nor 

 the heartlessness to go through with it." 



For those who object to wade through the political squabbles in the Daily 

 Papers, this Pamphlet will not be uninteresting. 



Daniel O'Rourke is by no means an ambiguous partisan, he goes to the full 

 length of a determined hostility to the church establishment in Ireland as it 

 has hitherto been preserved, and his opposition is not to be slighted. The 

 truths in the subjoined extract have not often been so forcibly put : 



"There is no lack of venal and soft-headed persons to raise the hue and cry 

 against honest men who prescribe a disagreeable remedy for national diseases. 

 At one time, the church is said to be in danger ; and the state being always 

 secondary according to approved usage, is lost sight of in the greater calami- 

 ty.* To be sure, the notion is somewhat stale ; yet having succeeded here- 

 tofore in catching so many fools, it is not surprising that knaves should still 

 resort to it as a tempting bait for so useful a purpose. But men are grown 

 somewhat wiser, so that it does not succeed quite so well as it did in the days 

 of Sacheverell and Lord George Gordon. It is now found out, that the 

 revenues of the clergy are not the church, that deans and chapters are not re- 

 ligion, and that the office of a Christian bishop is somewhat different from 

 that of a Lord bishop. Those who have paid any attention to inquiries so 

 foreign to the habits of statesmen need not to be informed that religion is 

 wholly a concern between man and his Maker, that the administration of it 

 is a matter of taste and convention regulated by the opinions of the parties, 

 and that it can subsist by its own energies without the intervention of cun- 

 ning men to prostitute it for their own temporal advantage. Those who 

 represent the political establishment of Christianity as essential to its pre- 

 servation, entertain very mean notions of the subject, as well as of the motives 

 that actuate its teachers. If they believed themselves they might be sent to 

 the college of fishermen to correct their opinions ; but knowledge and expe- 

 rience are thrown away upon men who identify religion with worldly dignities, 

 and consider it of no value when shorn of political influence." 



" A system of religion adapted chiefly to courtiers and country gentlemen, 

 for whose benefit it mainly exists, is undeserving the comprehensive character 

 of a national establishment. Such persons are fully able to bear the expense 

 of its maintenance without drawing upon funds that would be applied more 

 appropriately in providing instruction for those who cannot afford to pay for 



* At all public dinners given by a certain political party, the standing toast is 

 " Church and King ," a somewhat curious reversal of the order of loyalty not quite 

 in harmony with the law of the land. But when the fumes of intemperance take 

 possession of the brain, our thorough-paced royalists are not always regardful of 

 consequences. They may be excused, therefore, in such fits of absence for taking an 

 excursion to the land of the Monikins where the tail is in greater request than the head, 

 the post of honour being assigned to the former in exact proportion to the length and 

 breadth thereof. 



