of instructors, whose personal enthusiasm is kept up by the novelty of those audiences, on whose enthusiasm the novelty of their preachers re-acts, are continually urging the same invitation of coming-and of coming to Christ, but urging it in various modes, with various countenances, and in various turns of expression, are not unlikely to be roused by one amongst many; and (to use the conventicle diction) to be caught in the net of the Gospel. Let any man open the Evangelical or Methodist Magazine, and look who is to preach at the Tabernacle, and who is to preach at Queen Street, and so forth, during all the Sundays of each ensuing month, and he will have some conception of this web of artifice. But further, by this means, an ignorant and illiterate preacher, whose scanty stock of rude ideas would be speedily exhausted, were he restricted to one flock during any length of time, is enabled, by weaving his slender acquirements into the substance of a dozen discourses and prayers, to obtain the credit of inspiration in all the counties of England. In 1801, a Methodist of Halifax carried his daughter, a child about eight years of age, on a preaching perambulation through all the northern counties. This child had one or two sermons, and one or two prayers, conned over by rote, to pass for immediate inspirations. She touched at every town, and officiated a

single night; while her fame went abroad, and thousands flocked from far and near, to wonder at this infant prodigy of the pulpit.

What chance could even a Barrow, a Tillotson, or a Sherlock, preaching in one country town from year to year, have against such a raree-show of changed pictures; against a succession of such imps and impositions?

To these benefits, accruing from the system of circuits, we must add, that it is calculated, with admirable address, to conceal from the people any little imperfections in the moral characters of their preachers; and while affording a groundplan of their faith, to leave no time for examining the correspondence of their works. The established clergy, though, as a body, they have little cause to dread the severest and closest scrutiny of their conduct, are men, and are not destitute of those flaws and imperfections, of which Methodists, being likewise men, must needs possess their share. But while the former, spending their whole lifetime in the same neighbourhood, can hardly, with every vigilance, avoid committing some errors, which subject them to censures, unfavourable to the success of their ministry, the itinerant preacher is whisked from one district to another, at the very moment when the gloss of imposing novelty is beginning to wear off from his character, and when his blindest admirers would be unable to

disallow some detected leprosy, that might lurk beneath the surface of his professions and vociferations.

On all these accounts, the writer of the preceding strictures would humbly suggest the expediency of bringing the established and itinerant ministry more nearly on a level of advantage. Not that a residence for life in one parish should be abandoned: for the uniform and amiable example of a pastor, whose faults are few, and whose virtues are great, must be infinitely more profitable, upon the whole, in improving the morals of a district, than the searching sermons of a thousand roving fanatics. But where would be the intolerance of restraining by an act of the Legislature, this shifting system, this rambling spirit of Methodism? Let Government say to the Methodists, You shall have what you desire-you shall have what you are continually clamouring for; the clergy shall be forced into residence; and you shall be forced also. Wherever one of you obtains what he calls a cure of, souls, there is he to remain for the natural term of his life; and even there he shall be liable to a penalty, if he shall be found not to have preached-say forty or thirty Sundays, every year, in his own pulpit. But no, no; we shall immediately be told by our ultra-liberals, that this is not toleration, but persecution. Yet it is pretty nearly the perse

cution which the established clergy undergo; and the fact completely evinces that THEY are the only sect, the only body kept under, the only society, really persecuted, within the limits of the British empire.

In the mean time, the established clergy might, with much advantage, occasionally deliver a varied word of advice, from the pulpits of each other. All have not the same gifts: an amiable man may be timid, awkward, low-voiced, hesitating in speech, and unfortunate in his public exhibitions. Self-love may conceal some of these imperfections from his own consciousness: but it is right that his flock should now and then receive a treat, in the more animated address of a neighbouring orator, which shall convert their duty into a pleasure. Great good has been produced in Manchester and in other large towns, by the establishment of a weekly lecture in the parish-church, where every one of the clergy in the town and neighbourhood officiates in regular rotation. Such a plan is found to be beneficial in various ways; it takes away that excuse of "No Sunday clothes to come to church in," which the very poor urge often (though dissoluteness, and not poverty, be the cause of it), in attempting a vindication of their absence; it provides, at the same time, for another complaint, namely, want of accommodation for the inferior classes; and

it furnishes that variety of preaching which is at least defensible, when we consider, that, without it, the established and itinerant ministers cannot well be said to "start fair."

Again, why is it that so strong a leaning towards the Methodist interest should be ob servable in the comparative facility with which they are permitted to multiply their places of worship? One church, one conventicle, might seem to be toleration enough. But as it is, while the Conventicle Act precludes the established ministry from preaching in any part of their cures save the parish-church, and while chapels of ease are not erected without various consents, and security for endowment; a conventicle starts up in every hamlet, like Aladdin's palace, or a preaching-room is licensed without difficulty at the nearest sessions. Now, many of the parishes in England are of vast extent. Halifax is 37 miles in circumference: my three first curacies of Ormskirk, Frodsham, and Warrington, are not much less; and there were hamlets in each full six miles from the parish-church, while the first and the last could boast but one chapel each, and the second none. There were preachments and prayer-meetings in every hamlet in all of them. Consider, then, the case of a husbandman with his wife, children, and domestics, in the winter season, six miles from his parish-church, and having a

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