church; but while you maintain legislative guards for your own liberties against papal aggression; shelter your sister, and not only shelter her Protestant outworks, but aim at her true assimilation to yourselves, by the propagation of that glorious gospel which has delivered you from priestly tyranny, and is able to deliver them. Multiply, O multiply, the gracious appliances of British Christianity give her Irish Bibles, give her scriptural schools, give her evangelical missionaries. In the name of Him who snatched yourselves from the grasp of antichrist, as brands out of the fire; of Him who raised your population from the crouching slavery of the confessional, at the knee of a mortal man; to the holy liberty wherewith the Son of the living God maketh his people free-O! have mercy, christian mercy; and therein, true, holy, everlasting, godlike "justice for Ireland."

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LECTURE VI.

PRACTICAL

EFFICIENCY OF THE CHURCH HINDERED BY DEFECTS IN THE WORKING-FALSE FRIENDSHIP TO ATTEMPT TO HIDE REAL FAULTS-UNFAIR ADVANTAGE TAKEN OF CANDOUR, NO GOOD REASON AGAINST ITS EXERCISETRUE TEMPER OF CHRISTIAN REPROOF-SOME DEFECTS IN THE WORKING OF OUR NATIONAL CHURCH ENUMERATED, AND REMEDIES SUGGESTED-CONCLUDING APPEAL: THE INSEPARABLE CONNEXION BETWEEN RELIGION AND POLITICS, MIND AND BODY, CAUSE AND EFFECT-EXCEEDING URGENCY OF THIS SUBJECT-THE PROSPERITY, THE PEACE, THE FREE INSTITUTIONS, THE MISSIONARY USEFULNESS OF THE COUNTRY, AS WELL AS THE SALVATION OF IMMORTAL SOULS, ALL AT STAKE.

THE circumstances which impede the efficiency of our national church establishment, with reference to its working, involve considerations of great delicacy and difficulty. There are persons whose attachment to our church approaches to the ido latrous. In her general excellence, and their long established habits of thinking and feeling towards her; they seem to forget that there is any thing human in her arrangements, or any consequent risk

of mistake, or even error in judgment, to be found in any department of her polity. Of course they can exercise but little patience towards any deviation from unqualified defence, and unmixed eulogium.

To admit that there is anything defective, anything inefficient, anything requiring reformation in our church, sounds to such persons little less than profane.

I have no sympathy with such prepossessions. Cordially attached to our venerable mother I am indeed; and for this among other reasons, that she nowhere claims infallibility for anything except the word of God; but, on the contrary, plainly declares that church after church "hath erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith." Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome have erred; though not all to the same extent and there is no charter of entire exemption from error, for England; neither is it the part of real self-denying friendship to be blind or silent towards actually existing faults.

I am well aware of the malicious enmity with which any acknowledgment of error is seized upon and misrepresented. I know the unfair advantage which factious opponents never fail to take of candour. Instead of giving us credit for honesty enough to confess a fault where we see it, notwithstanding the general excellence, and our general defence, of the system; they disingenuously lay hold of our confession as if it were the only thing we had said, and fasten undivided attention upon

the admitted evil; to the wilful and dishonest neglect of all the unanswerable good. Still, we must not be driven to an uncandid course ourselves, because we are uncandidly treated by others. Honesty is christian duty at the outset, as well as the best policy in the end. There is, however, a vast difference between honest reproof (prompted by faithfulness and uttered in sorrow) and that virulence of invective which betrays a cordiality in denunciation.

It is truly painful, for their own sakes, to inspect the various ranks which are drawn up in hostile array against our church; and to look in vain, in any section of them, for the true spirit of scriptural reformers. They present the aspect of reckless levellers, rather than of sympathising protesters. Their zeal seems to partake more of the ostentatious madness of Jehu, than of the meek and weeping expostulations of Jeremiah. Their language remarkably harmonises with that which is ascribed to the Ishmaelites, the Moabites, and the Hagarens, Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek, when they were confederate against Zion. "Down with it," said they, "down to the ground." How widely different was the animating protestation of the faithful servant of God, who really felt and sincerely mourned over the existing abuses! Divinely commissioned to expose the corruptions of the Jewish church, and to proclaim the coming judgments of the Lord God of Israel; yet hear how he mingles compassion with his faithful protests! "For the hurt of the daughter

of my people am I hurt: I am black; astonishment hath taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician to heal? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered? O that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!"

Distinguishing between the people and their misconduct, he still calls them " my people." Separating their national institutions from the practical abuses by which their efficiency was impeded, and their God offended; he still speaks of healing, he still sighs for balm, and calls for a physician. This is the more remarkable, because God had distinctly declared to him the inevitable destruction of that church and nation; but as the time had not been told, and as there is nothing in faithfulness to God, or confidence in his predictions of national calamities, to interfere with the tenderness of true religious patriotism; Jeremiah could be a faithful reprover, without desiring the evil day, without denouncing, as if he had pleasure in, the calamity.

Saint Paul also, even after he knew by the infallible inspiration of the Holy Ghost, that his nation was to be cast off as a disobedient and gainsaying people; was filled with tender affectionate sorrow for his brethren, and fervent anxiety to save some. And need I refer to a greater than Jeremiah or Paul, to our great Exemplar, when proclaiming the ruin,

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