

1827.] [ 241 ] 



HUSH POLEMICS. 



,'-'' * s . .. 



Vous saureztantot quo c'est, et jugerez que je ne passe point les limit.es de raison : ainsi qup je 

 galope ces gubdeurs de theologic, qui ne trouvent bon, que ce qui quadre a, leur palliarde opinion. 

 Moy. 11 K PAUVENIR. 



THE English have, in all ages, been desperate theologians ; and they 

 were never more so than at present. This peculiarity of temper, which 

 we inherit not improbably with the thick blood of our northern ancestors, 

 will be ridiculed or eulogized According to the varying estimate men make 

 of the relative value of things spiritual and things temporal. If our most 

 efficacious struggles for liberty have begun in religious dissentions, it is no 

 less true that our passion for polemics has led us into some serious scrapes^ 

 Certain it is, that the national hatrod which plunged us into the slough of 

 the revolutionary war, was directed *.s much against the atheism as the 

 democracy of our graceless neighbours; arid dearly have we paid for reviving 

 religion amongst them d coup de canon, and propagating popery and 

 Jesuitism on the continent, by the preachings of our red-coated missionaries. 

 Jf moral results are to be added to pecuniary losses, Protestant ascendancy 

 in Ireland is a scarcely less expensive toy : to say nothing of what it costs 

 the country in tithes and incidentals at home, for the pleasure of dog- 

 matizing with effect, and of shutting the door of the constitution in the 

 face of all dissenters from the church establishment. 



Liberty of religious opinion is as necessary to man as his daily bread. 

 His senses can, by the assistance of art, detect the existence of animal- 

 culae so small, that thousands of them might expatiate on the point of 

 a needle ;* and he possesses chemical tests capable of demonstrating an 

 adulteration of the smallest quantities of a foreign substance : but Provi- 

 dence has bestowed upon him no such instruments for investigating moral 

 complexes ; and certainty of knowledge and uniformity of judgment, in 

 this department, are physical impossibilities. With this conviction strongly 

 impressed on our minds, the more sharply we English feel the injury of a. 

 force put on our own thoughts, the more anxiously we seek to place the 

 yoke of authority on the necks of others, and to render our own conceits 

 the measure of the ideas of the rest of mankind. This infirmity has rendered 

 us proverbially the dupes of the designing ; arid, while it has made us un- 

 just and unfeeling to others, it has blinded us to our own interests, and 

 made us false to ourselves. 



The insane desire of England to impose her faith and her establishment 

 on the reluctant population of Ireland has been productive of manifold 

 injury to both countries. Every year that the effort is persevered in, 

 increases the disquiet of the one, and the expense and the debility of the 

 other ; and we have now to deplore, in addition to all ancient grievances, 

 a rising spirit of polemical dispute arid proselytism, which is spreading a 

 flame throughout all Ireland, and is multiplying discontents and heart- 

 burnings, till they leave no one of its teeming population at ease, save the 

 man who is absolutely indifferent to every system and every creed. 



In disputation, there is a disposition to arrangements, somewhat resem- 

 bling the polarity produced by electricity. No sooner does a party arise, 

 and become violent in favour of any opinion, than it occasions, as it were, 

 by induction (to use a phrase of the electricians), a corresponding violence 

 in an opposite party hostile to that opinion; and society is divided into 



* Beucfcmt, Cours des Sciences Physiques, p. 98. 

 M.M. New Series. V01..IU. No.15. 2 I 



