constitution as established in church and state, injurious to the interests of true religion, to the spiritual instruction of the prisoners, and to the moral discipline of prisons."

Gentlemen, I fully agree with the remarks which have been made by your intelligent Chairman, on the clause for fixing popish and sectarian teachers, with salaries, in the prisons of the empire; and I congratulate you on the vigilance which has watched the progress of the bill, and the manliness which has dragged the whole intrigue into the light of day. If I might mention myself, I should say, that nothing but an urgent sense of duty could have overcome my habitual reluctance to appear on any public occasion. It is the first time that I have ever attended here; but learning, so late as yesterday, that from the circumstances of the season the meeting was unlikely to be attended by any of those gentlemen who generally join in your discussions, I determined to offer my tribute, such as it was, to the national resistance against a measure which I unhesitatingly pronounce the most subtle, the most daring, and the most dangerous of all the assaults of late years upon the faith of England. (Cheers.) I have called this measure an intrigue. It has all the characters of party. I find it neither demanded by public necessity, nor connected with public right. I find it as far from an honest liberality as it is from a claim of conscience. I find it, in fact, a changeling of popery, handed over to the sponsorship of the cabinet-a result of that same reckless spirit of hostility against the church, and that same restless tampering with the state which, in the one instance, anticipates the triumph of superstition, and in the other the triumph of revolution. You have heard the history of the clause from your Chairman; that it was inserted unsuspectedly into the prisons bill; that it was inserted by a Roman-catholic member, at the suggestion of a Roman-catholic body; that it received an addition of dexterity from a Roman-catholic divine; and that thus forged, sharpened, and envenomed by Romancatholic hands, it was offered to the country as part of the arms of the constitution! You will observe, that obnoxious as this measure is in itself, it deserves more especial resistance as a first attempt to strike directly for popish establishments in England. And its principle is as capacious as its object is daring. Combining popery with sectarianism (such are the monstrous unions of these times), its operation would level the church with every form of religious caprice, present and to come. Further still, by making the state undecided as to the forms of religion, it makes it indifferent to all. Further still, by an infraction alike of the common freedom of conscience and the common rights of property, it extorts from the members of the established church, comprising nine-tenths of the population, a revenue for the support of what they pronounce to be desperate error-what their fathers repelled

as heresy and fanaticism-and what every conscientious man among them feels himself bound to protest against, even at the peril of life and fortune. (Cheers.) But are we to be told that the object of this clause is to redress a grievance-that it is to give liberty of worship to prisoners? I doubt the object, as I deny the grievance. I hear nothing from the sufferers. No remonstrance, no petition, from within the prisons-none even from their partisans without. But I hear and see the insidiousness of engendering a national disease under pretext of a particular cure. I see too the folly of healing a grievance which no man feels, by a remedy for which no man would be the better-the rash absurdity of attempting to reinforce religious knowledge by rival ignorance, and to restore order by legalising confusion. (Cheers.) But are we to be told that it is hard to refuse prisoners of different sects the comfort of seeing their respective teachers? Sir, if the clause were to live upon this plea alone, it could not live a moment. No church in the world equals the church of England in true liberality. She coerces no man's feelings. She prohibits no man's right to stand clear in his conscience before heaven. In this, too, she is fully seconded by the law of the land. There is not a prison in the kingdom at this hour whose doors are shut to any teacher of any form of christianity. (Cheers.) On this subject I abstain from all unnecessary imputation of motives-I cannot enter into the minds of men. But every man can understand that the results would palpably have a much larger scope than the walls of your prisons, they would circumscribe your faith and your freedom. The measure would directly compel the church to a public recognition of popery and sectarianism; not merely to endure their existence, but to support their assumptions not merely to tolerate, but to pay tribute-not merely to subscribe her name to the bond of a spurious liberality, but to pay the penalty of that bond, the pound of flesh, which will be duly and triumphantly exacted; aye, and as close to the heart as the knife can be driven. (Cheers.) Let your church perish, and how long would your freedom survive? It would not have time to make her funeral oration. Sir, it is essential that the people of England should have their eyes opened to these things. They should be taught the progressive nature of popish encroachments. Hitherto its demands on protestant revenue have been confined to Ireland, where it has a college; and the colonies, where it has prelates and priests, proh nefas, supported by a government, every one of whose members on entering the legislature has taken an oath against the errors of popery! But, within 10 years from 1829, it invades England. It demands to erect its rival banner on the European citadel of protestantism. After a century and a half of providential prosperity, enjoyed on the very compact of its exclusion, it demands that we shall concede a full

alliance, only that we may be broken down into a speedy subjection. It demands that after having seen the temple cleared of the money-changers, we shall admit them to raise their tables again, renew their hereditary traffic, and involve us in the desecration. It demands, that after having expelled the evil spirit, and swept and purified the shrine, we shall invoke it to return, sevenfold more powerful, more arrogant, and more hostile than ever. If from the principle of the measure we turn to the details, we find the latter as contradictory as the former is unconstitutional, and both flagitious. (Cheers.) By the clause, for every 50 prisoners of any one religious persuasion, a chaplain is to be appointed by the magistrates, and paid out of the public funds. Let us look to this clause in practice. Take the instance of a gaol containing 200 prisoners (there are gaols which I believe contain twice the number). Place the scene in your Milbank Penitentiary. Those 200 would allow for four chaplains; and from the moment which made this clause the law of the land, the classification would go on rapidly. The loose faith of the unhappy race whom the law sends into the dungeon would not offer any stubborn resistance to the object. In all this matter we have a right to take extreme cases, for such cases would speedily become the true. You would thus have four authorised chaplains; you may also rely upon it that those new chaplains would not be chosen for their tameness-you would have four polemics; for the churchman must struggle in self-defence. And it is thus that by proclaiming perpetual conflict you proceed to inculcate the peace of Christianity. But, follow the natural career of the strife. Whose is to be the public teaching of the prisoners? From the cell the struggle will inevitably ascend to the chapel. The four chaplains are each equal in the sight of the law-will they not insist on being equal in the sight of the congregation. Whose then is to be the pulpit? Are they all to invade it at once, or are they to succeed by compromise? Thus you will have four men, of equal authority, treading on each other's heels, to repudiate each other's doctrines; every tenet which one pronounces as essential, ridiculed by three others as frivolous; and while scoffers are taught only to scoff the more, and the sincere are plunged into tenfold perplexity, you are to teach the charities and the mutual forbearance of christianity. But will the operation stop here? You establish the rival faiths-will they not establish the rival worships? How long will it be before you have the altar to the virgin, the images of the saints, the pictures and the relics-certainly in your prison, perhaps in your prison chapel? Conceive the worship of the churchman, the sectarian, and the Roman-catholic, struggling for the mastery. I see no end to the confusion. But, follow the operation another step. Will there be no attempts at proselytism? Of all religions,

popery is the most fitted to make proselytes among the unhappy race who fill the dungeon. With one hand holding forth the tenet that "out of Rome there is no salvation," the tenet of the inquisitor, and with the other holding forth the practical promise, "that within Rome there can be no perdition;" for who can suffer while the priest can absolve? It fastens at once upon the fear and the license of our nature; and thus armed at once with terror and temptation, it assails all classes alike, and carries the day. I should not be surprised to hear of a large and sudden display of popish proselytism in our gaols. But follow it still further. Among the conversions will there be nothing artificial? Are the inmates of those places either too deficient in worldly sagacity, or too delicate in their conscience, to embrace the palpable benefits of conversion? If popery at this hour haughtily stalks through the halls of public council, and drags trembling cabinets at its heels, will it be powerless at prison doors? Will its converts be left in chains? Are the new saints to linger in bonds? If an ambulatory viceroy could play the turnkey, will nothing be done by the ubiquitarian priest? Pass this law, and I should be scarcely astonished to see the year end by a general conversion, followed by a general gaol delivery. But will the rival polemics be satisfied by theological warfare? In our day everything turns to politics. Every question, however incongruous its material, is fused into that fiery stream. Will the fusion be cooled in your prisons? Pass this law, and you will find that you have only added the fanaticism of faction to the fanaticism of theology. Suppose the perfectly probable case, that a teacher of some of those politico-religious sects, which every day generates, should be seized by justice; suppose this Socialist, or Chartist, or by whatever startling name he is called, flung into prison; what is to prevent his 50 incarcerated disciples from demanding their champion as their chaplain? Or, what is to prevent the appointment, but that slightest of all barriers, the conscience of a popularity-hunting magistrate? And what is to prevent the new chaplain from preaching within the walls what he practised without? Thus you have the happy anomaly of an individual imprisoned by the statute for sedition, and licensed by the statute to teach it; mulcted by the Queen's Bench for his offence in the streets, and pensioned by the bench of magistrates for its weekly and daily repetition in the gaol. (Cheers.) But into what place is it that your clause especially introduces all this uproar? Every man who, in the exercise of his ministerial duty, has been called on to visit prisoners, must know, that it is of the first necessity to keep their minds from all external distraction; that the only mode of inculcating religion is to offer it in its most perfect simplicity; and that to press the great doctrines of the gospel in the spirit of peace, humility, and submission, affords the only hope of

softening hearts long callous by crime, and opening eyes long slumbering in the darkness of natural ignorance and perverted passions; above all things, to avoid all taint of controversy. Why, Sir, the very aspect of a prison-its gloom, its melancholy passages, even its massive and frowning solidity, all are made to impress upon the mind, that the petulant and fretful feelings of our nature should be suffered to find no entrance (cheers); that a severe composure should be the principle of all things, discipline the law, the world shut out, the prison a temporary grave. And is it in this place of severity and seclusion, that you would gather all the bitternesses, vanities, and rivalries which exasperate external life; and, worst of all, make the subject of exasperation that especial knowledge, on which alone you can rely for a change from the spirit of the world to that peace of God which passeth all understanding? You dispute, and your dispute is on religion; you turn the only lamp which is to light your paths into the very instrument of conflagration. What can be at once more inevita ble and more culpable? At the bed-side of the moral patient your doctors quarrel, and in their quarrel vilify the medicine which he must taste or die! It is presumed that upwards of 50,000 people pass through your prisons in the year I have heard twice the number named. Will not the mischiefs fostered in your prisons have their effect in debasing the religion and embittering the politics of the people among whom this mass is poured back? You use your Lazaretto, not to separate the infected from the sound, but to concentrate the contagion, and then send it back envenomed and rekindled through the land. But the grand object of the whole measure is actually to establish popery in England. Let not the dissenter believe that this boon is for him alone, or for him at all. (Cheers.) The same sinister policy includes him now, which included him in James the Second's declaration of liberty of conscience,-liberty for the papist -coercion for him and all besides. I respect the conscientious and peaceable dissenter, but even to the political dissenter common sense, fortified by old experience, would say, that popery will never suffer him but as a conspirator, and even as a conspirator, only till it can turn him into a slave. (Cheers.) The distinction is one of nature-it is utterly irreconcileable beyond the hour. Popery knows its strength. It may accept him as an accomplice, but it will disdain him as an ally. (Cheers.) Fix the popish priest in your gaols, with a legal commission and a public salary, and you virtually fix him in your towns, and give him a fixture in the land. You give him all that he has sought for so long to shake your church. You give him the spot to plant that lever which is to heave your empire from its centre. (Cheers.) Place him once in your prisons, and what is to hinder the same plea from placing him in your workhouses? Place him in your