work upon men, and the same dispositions and inclinations in men to be wrought upon, before, that there are now. All the affairs of the world are the births and issue of men's actions; and all actions come from the meeting and collision of faculties with suitable objects. There were then the same incentives of desire, on the one side—the same attractiveness in riches, the same relish in sovereignty, the same temptation in beauty, the same delicacy in meats and taste in wines; and, on the other side, there were the same appetites of covetousness and ambition, the same fuel of lust and intemperance."
"And these are the wheels upon which the whole visible scene of affairs, ethic and politic, turns and depends. The business of the world is imitation, and that which we call novelty is nothing but repetition."—South's Sermons, v. 236.
It was thought a novelty, last summer, when Joseph Hume propounded the doctrine that the late Lord Castlereagh was a dishonest politician, but an honest man. That is, that a man may vote black white in the House of Commons, and walk up Parliament Street in the full pride and bloom of moral integrity. In short, that the common restraints of religion and morality are laid aside in the lobby, to be resumed on coming out. But the fellow cannot be original in any thing; this sinful folly is only repeated from the dunces of South's time.
"But that people may not be wicked without some plea or pretence to cover and protect them from being thought so, there has a very serviceable distinction been found out and asserted by some, between a religious and a political conscience, in every one that is a governor."—Ibid, 132.
But Joseph, according to Sir Walter Scott, the best judge of character in Europe, "is an ass, and not worth any man's thinking about." Yet some such vicious sophistry must have possessed the mind of Dr Pye Smith when he penned that extraordinary and portentous document, in which, after stripping Joseph's character of all that could give him moral or political weight, he ordains, nevertheless, that the said Joseph is to be deemed the soundest of all guardians of religion; and assuming a truly pontifical tone, issues his bull in the character of Pope Pye-us I., decreeing that the faithful shall vote according to his will. The same delusion must have perverted the hearts of those who so basely came forward in 1837 to propose an enquiry into the pension list, which enquiry they had themselves called "disgusting" in 1836! Nay, is it not a fact that no man thinks himself entitled to complain of the grossest abuse, or of charges of the utmost immorality, if they are explained as affecting only his political, and not his personal character? This may be a convenient method of smoothing the asperities of debate, but it encourages a most wretched moral misconception.
"What we call novelty is nothing but repetition," observes the language of a professed friend of the Church.
In the debate on Lord John Russell's resolution respecting Irish Church property, April 2, 1835, Mr Fowell Buxton said, that "in his mind there never was so unfortunate a mistake as to suppose that a church acquired weight and influence by wealth and power. * * But he should like now to see the experiment tried of a body of men who, if they entered the church, could enter it from no other motive than that of doing good; who could be influenced by no hope of affluence; and though he thought it was natural, and to be expected, that mere human and worldly means should be inefficient, yet, he said, it was not in human nature to resist the efforts of a man, who, by his disinterested energy—by his self-denial—by living in decent privacy—by the purity of his conduct—by his charity—by what he would call the visible influence of his virtuous life, showed that he sought higher rewards than mere worldly acquisitions. He would, therefore, dispense with these advantages, which the Protestant Church possessed. * * The ministers of the Protestant religion in Ireland had been exposed to the fire of persecution, and out of that flame had arisen as pure and apostolical a ministry as any in the world. He would not for the world do those good men an injustice."
So he voted for the Appropriation Clause!
Was this argument new? It had been refuted by South 150 years ago. "If our Church cannot be great; which
