THE REFLECTOR. No. II. ART. I.-Church and Constitution, t THE CHURCH. No scholar need be informed that the Greek word which we render church, ExxAnoia, has the general meaning of a convoked assembly, and was thus applied previously to the times of Christianity; since which period only, its signification has been limited to an assembly for religious purposes. It was, however, when thus restricted, always understood to comprehend the whole body composing such an assembly, without any distinction of clergy and laity, the first of whom, being the servants or ministers of the assembly, could have had no existence apart from the rest. Nothing, therefore, can be a greater impropriety of speech than to appropriate the word church to the clerical order; an inaccuracy of the same kind as if the word state were made to signify the officers of government exclusively of the nation. This abuse of language, however, was apparently not introduced without design; for it has been made the basis of an assumed right of special property, which could not have been supposed to exist under the notion that the church was synonymous with the whole number of persons concurring in one faith and worship. A na tional or established church (of which I now mean to speak) can possess nothing which the nation considered in any other light does not possess; for the nation assembled in public worship consists of the same individuals as the nation met in a political convention, a military array, or on any other occasion in which it acts conjunctly. In all these, it may exercise its entire rights as far as they apply to the purpose of assembling; and to suppose them limited by partial rights, is the absurdity of making a part greater than the whole. To avoid this manifest inconsistency, a kind of abstract idea has been formed of the church, represented VOL. I. NO. II.. S represented by its ministers or clergy, in contradistinction to the state, and possessing its own unalienable rights as an independent body; and in order to guard these rights, and the mass of property acquired by it under this imaginary self-existence, a kind of partnership with the Almighty has been invented, throwing a fence of sacredness around every thing connected with it, which could not be violated without a crime of the deepest dye. Dona. tions made to the church have thus been said, in language closely bordering on blasphemy, to be given to God—for what, in fact, can be a grosser affront to the divine nature than to suppose it capable of receiving a benefaction from its own creature ?—and in consequence, a resumption of such gift has been stigmatised as impiety joined to robbery. This association between the priest and his deity has been of old standing, and almost universal; evidently grounded upon that vicious analogy which is the essence of all popular religions, and which by enjoining sacrifices, consecrations, and a variety of external rites of homage and service, assimilates as much as possible the divine nature with the human. Such was the power of this association, that the church in its corporate capacity long flourished in security under its protec. tion; and even the subversion of the popish superstition in this country did not diminish the reverence paid to the church and its property in the minds of those who were trained to bow to ecclesiastical authority. Lord Clarendon, an oracle of that party, speaking of his sentiments with respect to the Church of Eng. land, says, that "he thought that the taking away any of its revenue, and applying it to secular uses, was robbery and no. torious sacrilege." As this personified lady existed before the Reformation, and was possessed of many rich estates is abbeys, priories, and the like, the stripping her of them at that period must, upon the same principles, be regarded as equally flagitious; and so indeed it has been considered by many high-church antiquarians, who have taken great pleasure in pointing out the judgments which fell upon the families that partook of the spoil. The learned Sir Henry Spelman wrote an express treatise on the subject, entitled "A History of Sacrilege." The rational idea of an established church is sufficiently sim. ple and obvious. Public worship is regarded both as a duty to God, and an institution of great utility to man; and there are few countries in which it has not been thought advisable to make a provision for its performance, not dependent on the will of individuals, but compulsory; like that for the administration of justice and for public defence. This constitutes the essence of a national or established church, which church comprehends the body of a nation in its religious capacity. But the mode and amount of provision, and the external frame and constitution of of the church, must be supposed to be always as much within the choice and determination of the existing national body as any thing else appertaining to its collective state; and it is absurd to embody an intellectual conception and set it up as a claimant of rights restrictive of those of the community in which all other public rights reside. The clergy are a part of this church, and individually have the same claims in equity to remuneration for services, and even to the fulfilment of reasonable expectations, that other men have; but it is as an existing and not a future order; and there is no more ground to consider a present generation as bound by a past in its regulations of an establishment for public worship, than in regulations of any other kind in which the good of society is concerned. The It follows, that the crime of sacrilege, as applied to the resumption, by the supreme power in a state, of property once devoted to religious uses, is a mere fiction. If, indeed, the state were actuated by a design to subvert public religion altogether, it might justly be charged with impiety; but as far as regards a different application of property of which itself is the legal owner, it is manifest that there exists no human claimant which has a right to think itself aggrieved; and with relation to the Supreme Being, nothing can be altered by the disposition of man. forms of consecration, by which things have been solemnly appropriated to the service of the Deity, if divested of figurative language, could have had no other proper meaning, than to denote the present intention of those who concurred in such appropria. tion; and to affix to that rite a notion similar to that of conveying property to a human individual, is a vulgar and debasing superstition. The true service of God is in the hearts of his adorers: all besides is instrumental and symbolical; and the best means of exciting devotional sentiments will vary according to circumstances and opinions. There might be times in which the monastic life would be an useful mixture in society, to impress a rude people with veneration for displays of piety and virtue, of which it would have been difficult otherwise to preserve examples; but when monasteries became the abodes of abuse, imposture, and superstition, and men's ideas of them were altered, it was right to abolish them, and to resume the funds by which they were maintained. These funds might be injudiciously applied or unfaithfully administered; but still, the right of applying them to new purposes was vested in the community. That community was itself the church, and could lie under no other obligation in its religious capacity than that of providing the requisites for public worship in the mode which to itself appeared preferable. THE CONSTITUTION. "I love the Constitution," said a certain City spokesman, “for I have grown rich under it :"—an honest account of the matter! leaving his hearers to infer, that had he remained a poor man, no praises of the Constitution would have come out of his mouth. The probability is, that he had never troubled himself with spe culations on the nature of the Constitution, or its fitness to answer the ends for which government was instituted, but under. stood by the term, simply that state of things which had enabled him to make money. Possibly, that which excited his affection might be one of those very corruptions which afford so many topics for patriotic declamation, and are so seriously lamented by real friends to the Constitution as subversive of its true principles. But this manner of regarding and estimating the Constitution is by no means peculiar to the worthy citizen above alluded to. In all the superior classes individuals are to be found whose secret attachment to the Constitution is nothing more than love of emolument; and when they make it the subject of panegyric, though they employ the cant terms of general praise, their appro. bation is mentally fixed upon those parts on which their wealth and consequence depend. The peer, who takes the lead at a county meeting,, in his florid eulogy on our excellent Constitution, may think only on that which has rendered him an hereditary legislator; the reverend dignitary who follows him,-on "the best constituted church in Christendom;" the boroughholder, on that admirable proportion in the representation, which allots forty-four members to Cornwall, and four to London; the placeman, on the ample provision for sinecures and reversions; and thus, with respect to individuals, in every order to which the state extends peculiar favours. There is no wonder that men in whom self predominates above all other considerations should entertain such various views of the Constitution, when they who possess real public feelings, and regard government as a common and not a private concern, are found to differ so widely in their notions on the subject. If the question were asked individually to a number of eulogists of the Constitution, "Pray what do you mean by the word?" how various would be the answers given!-Let us speculate a little on this supposition. From a Church-and-King man the answer would be simple. The essentials of the Constitution to him are a crown and mitre, and he cares little for the checks and balances of a mixed mo narchy. narchy. Reverting to the time when it was declared from the throne to be sedition to dispute "what a king may do in the height of his power," and the doctrine was re-echoed by prelates who entitled his Majesty "the breath of their nostrils," they sum up all political merit in the virtue of loyalty; and having been able, after a long struggle, to transfer this sentiment from the House of Stuart to that of Brunswick, they bend at the foot of the throne with as much devotion as their ancestors did when a James or a Charles was seated on it. Of such constitutionalists as these (if they deserve the name), the number, however, is probably small. They are chiefly to be met with in the ancient haunts of jacobitism and the purlieus of the court. A much more numerous class consists of those who consider the Constitution merely as a thing they are born to, as they are to their estates. With them, a system of government is nothing but a set of precedents, and every political question is to be decided on the same principles as a trial at law. Extravagant in their praises of the wisdom of our ancestors, and fond of deriving every existing institution from remote antiquity, they choose to overlook all the changes the Constitution has undergone in a series of ages, the improvements on one hand, and the corruptions on the other, and take it in the mass, as they find it, as if it were sent down ready made from Heaven. They are furnished with a set of standing arguments against innovations, except such as fall in with their own interests or prejudices; and. are firm adherents to the letter, when the spirit plainly speaks a contrary sense. These form the great body in which the old distinctions of Whig and Tory are inseparably confounded; which includes all the expectants of power and emolument; which de fends every abuse, insists on every prerogative, and rejects every melioration. Constitution with these is a kind of talismanic word, of power to silence all appeals to reason and argument, and like waistcoat in a mad-house, to quiet what they would call the ravings of hot-headed politicians. Hyde was a constitution. alist of this class, in the reign of Charles I., when he held that "the English government was so equally poised, that if the leastbranch of the prerogative was torn off, the subject suffered by it ;" and yet, at that time, the courts of wards and of highcommission, and the star-chamber, subsisted, the judges were re. moveable at the pleasure of the crown, and there was no provi sion for securing the assembling of parliaments after stated intervals, so that a king who did not want money might govern with. out them. If subsequent alterations in these and various other points respecting the prerogative are acknowledged to have been improvements, this eminent constitutionalist must be admitted to haye erred in his judgment. The septennial act, and the addition ડે ૩ to |