The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• France 1820–21
• 1.: Journal and Notebook of a Year In France May 1820 to July 1821
• 2.: Traité De Logique 1820-21
• Chapitre I: ConsidÉrations GÈnÉrales
• Chapitre II: Des IdÉes En GÈnÉral
• Chapitre III: Sources OÙ Nous Puisons Nos IdÉes
• Chapitre IV: Classification Des IdÉes
• Chapitre V: Des Notions Abstraites
• Chapitre VI: De La Division
• Chapitre VII: De La DÉfinition
• Chapitre VIII: Du Langage
• Chapitre IX: De L’origine Des IdÉes
• 3.: Lecture Notes On Logic 1820-21
• Debating Speeches 1823–29
• 4.: The Utility of Knowledge 1823
• 5.: Parliamentary Reform [1] August 1824
• 6.: Parliamentary Reform [2] August 1824
• 7.: Population: Proaemium 1825
• 8.: Population 1825
• 9.: Population: Reply to Thirlwall 1825
• 10.: Cooperation: First Speech 1825
• 11.: Cooperation: Intended Speech 1825
• 12.: Cooperation: Closing Speech 1825
• 13.: Cooperation: Notes 1825
• 14.: Influence of the Aristocracy 9 December, 1825
• 15.: Primogeniture 20 January, 1826
• 16.: Catiline’s Conspiracy 28 February, 1826
• 17.: The Universities [1] 7 April, 1826
• 18.: The Universities [2] 7 April, 1826
• 19.: The British Constitution [1] 19 May [?], 1826
• 20.: The British Constitution [2] 19 May, 1826
• 21.: The Influence of Lawyers 30 March, 1827?
• 22.: The Use of History 1827
• 23.: The Coalition Ministry 29 June, 1827
• 24.: The Present State of Literature 16 November, 1827
• 25.: The Church 15 February, 1828
• 26.: Perfectibility 2 May, 1828
• 27.: Wordsworth and Byron 30 January, 1829
• 28.: Montesquieu 3 April, 1829

25.

The Church

15 FEBRUARY, 1828

my honourable friend the proposer of the question¹ has observed in his speech, that it is difficult to speak against the church, because men will not listen to the evidence. The experience of the preceding evening has shewn that there is another difficulty, viz. that when they do listen to it, they are very much disposed to fritter it away. It would indeed be difficult to compose a speech on any subject that would stand the test which these gentlemen seemed disposed to apply to it. If you rest your case upon the universal principles of human nature, and shew that from the situation in which the Church of England is placed, certain actions are the natural consequences, this is called declamation and assumption, and you are asked for facts: when, in obedience to this demand, you bring forward facts, drawn from different periods of church history, these facts are exhibited singly, and you are triumphantly informed that each one, if there were only that one, might be a singular instance and was no proof of a general rule. If you allude to persecuting statutes enacted long ago, you are told that they were evidence of a spirit which no longer exists: if to shew that the spirit survives you observe that the laws still subsist even although it is not possible to execute them, you are told by way of reply that as the spirit is not strong enough to surmount an impossibility, no such spirit exists. If you cite a flagrant instance of direct persecution in what are considered by churchmen to be the best times of the church, you are told with much indignation that the church has changed. If you quote a modern instance, which fortunately happens to be universally known, they then at last stand at bay, drop all artifice and evasion, turn round upon the man who dares to condemn the persecution, and accuse him of sympathizing with the impious. And here, Sir, I cannot help blaming my honourable friend, not indeed for the warmth with which he repelled this accusation, for most assuredly if it was a charge to be repelled at all, it was a charge to be repelled warmly. But I blame him because the accusation, coming from the quarter it did and on the occasion on which it did, was one which he had reason to be proud of. I am thankful to the honourable gentleman for the term—I invite the honourable gentleman to apply it to me—I should blush to be that which the honourable gentleman would not call a friend of the impious.² I thank heaven that my heart is not so hardened by bigotry nor my understanding so perverted by lawyercraft but that I can sympathize with an oppressed man, whatever may be his religious opinions. The man, be he Christian or Atheist who endures torture and ignominy because he will not swerve from his convictions is to me a martyr, and I should detest myself if I could not venerate him as he deserves. What is it to me if Mr. Carlile is not a good reasoner?³ I never thought him a good reasoner: but he is what I respect infinitely more, he is a man of principle, and a man who will stand to his principles though he should stand alone, and though to be merely supposed to sympathize with him is tantamount to an accusation of impiety, shall I, because this man is not a good logician,—a man who is as ready to die at the stake for what he thinks the truth, as any clergyman of the Church of England can be ready for what he thinks the truth to conduct him thither,—shall I knowing how few such men there are and how much is due to those few when they arise, be deterred from expressing my disapprobation of their persecutors by a cry of impiety? Let the honourable gentleman keep such stuff for the House of Commons: there he will find in hundreds of bosoms a chord which will respond to that which vibrates in his own: but I much mistake the tone of feeling in this Society, if it contains one man, Tory or Churchman though he be, to whom such feelings as the honourable gentleman gave utterance to, on the preceding evening, are not entirely unknown.

With regard to the question in hand, it would certainly be a waste of words to discuss, whether or not the Church of England is a persecuting church, with a gentleman who thinks that to immure Mr. Carlile and about twenty of his coadjutors in dungeons for terms of two, three, and five years is not persecution.⁴ If a man squares his conscience by what the church does to him of course the church can never be in the wrong; and if the good old practice of burning heretics were revived, no doubt some persons would be still found who would maintain that even this was not persecution. But my honourable friend who spoke fourth on the preceding evening⁵ is not of this stamp, and to him a somewhat different answer is due. He had discretion enough to admit the iniquity of these persecutions but affirmed that they are not imputable to the clergy of the Church of England. I am glad, Sir, that this is the line of defence now resorted to by the more able advocates of the Church of England because, in the first place, it shews that in their opinion the time is now come when such proceedings as those which have taken place against Mr. Carlile no longer admit of being openly defended: but further, I rejoice to learn that these are the sentiments of my honourable friend, because as he seems on this occasion to exculpate the church, not because such proceedings are defensible, but because the church has no share in them, I am led to conclude that if it could be proved to his satisfaction that these persecutions are in any degree imputable to the church, he would no longer consider the church capable of being defended on this ground. Now I shall easily be able to adduce evidence, which will satisfy even my honourable friend’s scepticism on this point. I do not pretend that the church alone is to blame; there is enough of religious bigotry, God knows, both in other professions and in other sects, although the existence of a powerful body who are bound by interest to work up that baneful spirit, to the highest pitch cannot have much tendency to mitigate it, at least: But there is a good deal to be said in respect to the part which the Church of England has actually taken in the persecution. My honourable friend in speaking on this subject, has shewn (to parody an expression of Mr. Sheridan) a very pious ignorance on some topics:⁶ he has buried all transactions of this description, anterior to the late prosecution of the Rev. R. Taylor,⁷ in discreet oblivion. In that proceeding he says that Dissenters were the chief agents, and seems not to be aware that the prime mover in the affair, Mr. Alderman Atkins, is no Dissenter but a most orthodox highchurchman.⁸ Although, however, my honourable friend cannot carry his recollection any further back I can, and I can state for the benefit of his rather short memories, that more than one-half of the prosecutions of Mr. Carlile, his family and his coadjutors, were at the prosecution of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.⁹ Now although I give my honourable friend credit for a very considerable degree of ingenuity, I do not suppose him to possess so great a share of it as to be able to explain away the list of subscribers to that Society: a list comprising nearly as great a number of bishops, and dignitaries of the church as subscribed to that other creditable establishment, the Bridge Street Association,¹⁰ which last attempt to revive the execrable tyranny over political opinion, the good sense and virtue of this country crushed in the bud. As I have alluded to this final ebullition of feelings which, though as far as ever from being extinguished, no man now dares avow, I cannot help saying, that I find it difficult to decide which aspect of the affair tells most against the reverend subscribers; the odiousness of the design, or the contemptible imbecility of the execution. The whole funds of that Association sufficed only for, I believe, nine prosecutions—and these in every, or almost every instance, directed against mere accessories and not principals in what they pretended to call an offence. But the Association is gone, where all such Associations ought to go—gone, I should say for ever, were it not that clergymen, who according to the well known remark of Lord Clarendon, understand the least, and take the worst measure of human affairs, of all men who can read or write,¹¹ are likely enough to suffer themselves to be hoaxed out of a little more of their money by some cunning attorney, who if he can succeed in persuading them that his object in asking for it is to make use of it for the purpose of helping to degrade the human mind, can make himself sure of raising, among a large portion of them at least enough to make his own fortune by law expences, which is generally the purpose of the more prominent agents in such transactions.

But if this institution is now no more, the Vice Society still exists; and by this Society were most of the prosecutions against Carlile and his followers instituted. Here introduce the ^agloating^a .

^bMy honourable friend has told me that the clergy gloated over his sufferings: this was perhaps going a little too far since there are persons to be found, and very likely some of them may be subscribers to the Vice Society, who, as is reported on one occasion of Napoleon, can with maudlin sensibility weep for the evils they inflict .¹² This however is small consolation to the sufferer.^b The very fact, that such proceedings could emanate from a Society so named, is a pregnant proof of the spirit which prevails among its lay and clerical members. Suppression of opinions they term suppression of vice: the honest promulgation of doctrines different from what they consider right they have the audacity to term a vice, an act of immorality: I do not affect surprise at this; it is far better to say plainly that he who does not believe as they do, is ipso facto a vicious and profligate man, than to impute all manner of other vices to him, as they have almost invariably done. The common vice of partisans, that of heaping calumnies upon the head of an opponent, is one by which it is matter of common observation that priests of all religions whether from blind credulity or from a still worse principle have been distinguished beyond all other men. The clergy of the Church of England have not, it is true, come quite up to the mark of the Roman Catholic clergy in this respect, because they have never had so much power of making false statements uncontradicted; but they have carried the practice of defamation as far as it could with safety be carried, and have by their calumnies embittered the lives of men among the brightest ornaments of human nature.

If my honourable friend has made so lame a defence of the church on the subject of religious prosecutions, his coadjutor¹³ has made a still more feeble one on the subject of those badges of a more widely spreading spirit of persecution which exist on our statue book under the name of the Test and Corporation Acts.¹⁴ The honourable gentleman says that those Acts were not intended for the support of the church: the honourable gentleman is a good lawyer; but Blackstone was a better; and if the honourable gentleman is right, Blackstone is wrong; for Blackstone says expressly that these Acts exist for the support of the church.¹⁵ But, when I find the honourable gentleman ignorant of the tricks by which the Protestant Dissenters were persuaded not to oppose these Acts, under the pretence that they would not be enforced against them, tricks which are wittily typified by Arbuthnot under the emblem of Don Diego persuading Jack to hang himself, under pretence that Sir Roger would cut him down;¹⁶ when I likewise find the honourable gentleman ignorant, at least apparently so, of the too celebrated Act of Uniformity;¹⁷ when I find him equally ignorant of the equally celebrated statute termed the Occasional Conformity Act¹⁸ passed to keep out those who, although Dissenters, yet not considering the service of the Church of England to be profane or idolatrous, thought that they could conscientiously attend it occasionally and thereby escape the disabilities of the law—when I see all this and when I find him absolutely astonished that Hume should be considered a good witness against the church, a man who sold his conscience for them, a writer who violated every law of historical veracity in order to screen the church,¹⁹ —I am tempted to ask, under what High Church ^cparson^c , in what obscure corner of the kingdom remote from all access of books and converse of men, the honourable gentleman imbibed his knowledge of history. The battle of the church really is not to be thus fought—we all know how great allowances ought to be made for an extemporaneous effusion but it really is a fact, that some knowledge of the subject is necessary even to make a defender of the church; and until the honourable gentleman shall have acquired such knowledge or at least shall have it more under his command than he appeared to have on the former evening, it would be much wiser in him were he to leave the cause of the church in the hands of my honourable friend who so ably followed on the same side.²⁰

I have now concluded by far the greater part of what I intend to trouble the Society with on this evening. It was in fact only in order to support and vindicate my friend the proposer of the question, that I felt desirous of taking any part whatever in the discussion, since I do not consider the question to be one which admits of being discussed with much prospect of advantage in a debate, at least if the end in view be mutual persuasion. The difference between us is too deeply rooted, and is connected on both sides with too great a number of extensive and important principles, each of them far more than sufficient to form in itself the subject of an animated and protracted discussion. How, for instance, can we agree in our estimation of the church in respect of the support which it lends to the aristocratic institutions of this country, so long as there is one portion among us who disapprove of these institutions, and think that every support which they possess is one too many, while the remainder so far from thinking that any support should be taken away, are of opinion that those institutions require, and ought to have still stronger supports than they possess? Or how again can two of the ablest speakers on the last evening,²¹ agree in their estimate of Hume’s argument in favour of a church establishment, that it diminishes the activity of the clergy; when the one is a warm admirer and partaker of religious enthusiasm, and the other condemns it under the name of fanaticism? There is a great deal more involved in this question than can be stated in a debate, and I should despise the man who, having previously been of a different opinion, could be convinced in an evening by my honourable friend’s arguments or by mine. I believe it is perfectly well understood between my other honourable friend and me, that his opinion is the legitimate consequence of his principles, and my opinion of mine. I do not however think that a discussion of this sort is wholly useless. Though it does not enable us to compare our several views, it enables all of us to know what they are; which I cannot but consider as a point gained in favor of truth and fair dealing, since I think I have observed that much of the misrepresentation and misunderstanding which take place both in public and in private life, and very serious impediment to the fair and legitimate collision of opinion arises from real bonâ fide ignorance on one side, of the views and principles of the other. It is so important, that a perfect mutual understanding should exist on this point, that I think I shall be justified in occupying five minutes more of the Society’s time for that purpose. As my object is only that gentlemen should know the reasons, not that they should be convinced by them, five minutes will suffice for that purpose as well as an hour. My honourable friend has given us an able statement of his reasons, and I freely admit that several of them are deserving of grave consideration. I do not at present intend to contest those reasons; I have only to state my own; and I shall be satisfied with one grand one, but that indeed may be said in a certain sense to include all the rest. I am an enemy to church establishments because an established clergy must be enemies to the progressiveness of the human mind.

I hold, that it is of the nature of the human mind to be progressive. But stop: I must not forget that there are persons in this country, and for aught I know in this Society, to whom the march of intellect, which is another word for the progressiveness of the human mind, is a subject of laughter and derision. I know indeed that this feigned laughter is in reality a cloak for the most abject fear, and that it would be a most delightful relief to the minds of many of these laughers if they could really feel towards the march of intellect, all the contempt they express. Still, however, since there are such persons, I think it advisable not to use any expression at which they are likely to cavil. I hold then, that it is of the nature of the human mind to profit by experience. As the aggregate of our experience is every day increasing, this of itself has a tendency to render the species progressive: but besides this we become better qualified to profit by experience in proportion to the culture of our intellectual faculties, and of that culture there are two great instruments, education and discussion. I hold that wherever mankind have been qualified to profit by experience, by possessing even in a moderate degree, these two great instruments, they have, as the mass of experience has increased, constantly grown wiser and better; and that this progressive advancement has never been interrupted but when these two means of instruction have been prevented from existing by despotism as in the Roman empire, by anarchy as in feudal Europe, or by superstition and priestcraft as in Spain and Portugal. I further hold, that from the present state and future prospects of Great Britain, France, and North America, there is, humanly speaking, no probability that these causes of retrogression should ever again recur, and that from the increasing diffusion and growing power of the two great instruments, education and discussion, it is to be expected that the human mind in these countries will continue to advance, not only with an unretarded, but as it has done during the last twenty years, with a rapidly increasing pace.

Now it is to this great tendency of the human mind, and to education and discussion as the promoters of it, that in my view of the matter, an established clergy by a sort of moral necessity must be, and at any rate always is, the bitter enemy. When I say an established clergy I mean any clergy, which is paid on condition of teaching a particular creed, but more especially a clergy connected with the governing powers of the state, and bound by that connexion to the support of certain political tenets as well as religious ones.

If there were a corporate body of physicians or a corporate body of engineers, paid by the state, rewarded with honours and wealth, on condition that they should always teach a certain set of doctrines in physic or mechanics, it can scarcely be doubted that such a body would be interested in preventing all improvement in physic or mechanics, lest the public should get beyond their particular tenets, and having done so should cease to regard these their teachers with due veneration. Happily this is not the case. Neither the physician nor the engineer is bound down to a particular set of opinions in their respective sciences; the clergyman is. Wherever there is a hierarchy—wherever there is such a thing as church government, adherence to certain tenets is the condition on which he holds both his emoluments and his power. If there be not only a hierarchy but a hierarchy connected with the ruling powers in the state, it becomes the interest of its members to uphold the existing government with all the political and moral, as well as religious prejudices, which may conduce to their holding that government in veneration. It will perhaps be said, that these opinions are the right opinions. This may be true; but it likewise may be false. It would be a considerable stretch of arrogance in mankind to suppose that they had already attained the pinnacle of knowledge either in religion or politics; it is highly probable that there is still room for improvement in both: I am sure there is much need at least so long as our perfect government finds it very difficult to prevent half our population from dying of hunger and our perfect religion has not yet found the means of preventing our jails from being constantly full. I shall not however chuse to rest my case upon any argument which implies that it is possible for an established opinion to be wrong. I will suppose that our clergy teach no opinions but such as are right, either in religion or politics. It is not the less true that in the progress of human improvement, every one of these opinions comes to be questioned. The good of mankind requires that it should be so. The good of mankind requires that nothing should be believed until the question be first asked, what evidence there is for it. The very idea of progressiveness implies not indeed the rejection, but the questioning of all established opinions. The human intellect is then only in its right state when it has searched all things, in order that it may hold fast by that which is good. Now when this spirit of universal enquiry arises, it must extend to those two most important subjects: the experience of all ages warrants the assertion that when the human mind once begins to improve, men will discuss religion and politics and no force, which does not go the length of crushing the spirit of improvement altogether, can prevent it. In consequence of this discussion persons are sure to arise who dispute the established opinions. These persons are listened to, they are allowed at least a patient hearing. This the clergy will never voluntarily allow. It is of no use to say that the clergy may defend their opinions; so they may; and if the opinions be true, and be defended with as much ability as they are attacked, they will be defended successfully. But this would give an immensity of trouble. It is well known that richly endowed bodies are never very fond of trouble: it is allowed both by the friends and the enemies of opulent church establishments, that the love of ease is always their predominant infirmity. Besides the trouble there is moreover always a lurking apprehension, lest after all their endeavours to keep the people in the right path should not succeed, or if it should, people should no longer duly venerate their pastors for communicating to them truths which, as they had examined into the evidence, they would seem to owe to their own understandings alone. How much easier and how much safer would it be, if they could be prevented from enquiring at all—if they could be made to regard the very act of enquiry, nay the very thought of questioning an established opinion, as involving the deepest guilt. It is true that they will not then hold these opinions like rational creatures, but it is of no consequence to the clergy that they should hold them like rational beings, provided they only hold them strongly enough: and no opinions are held so strongly as those which we are taught that it is impious even to demand a reason for.

Such are the motives which induce an endowed clergy to be the enemies of discussion, and as discussion always accompanies improvement they are the enemies of improvement. In order to prevent discussion, they have not scrupled wherever they had the power to debase the human mind down to the level of the brutes. In all countries where they could get the civil power to side with them, that is in almost all the Catholic countries of Europe, they have succeeded in their nefarious purpose, and mankind are still grovelling at their feet. It is very idle to say that these are Catholic priests, and therefore not to be quoted against the Church of England. That the Catholic priests perpetrated these things is not owing to any peculiar perversity in the nature of the men, it is owing to their interests as priests, aided by a religion which gave them more power to effect their purposes, but did not give them a stronger motive. In England at the reformation it became the interest of the civil power to raise public feeling against the church, and the latter consequently had no longer much power either moral or political of effecting its ends, but as soon as, under Charles I,²² it found the civil power ready to renew the alliance, it recommenced its war against the progress of the human mind, and nearly succeeded in throwing us back to the condition of France and Spain. Fortunately the habit of free enquiry had in the preceding years been too strong to be checked, and we were saved by a revolution from the double consummation of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny. Though this grand conspiracy had failed the Church of England has never ceased its resistance²³ in the detail. Not one step has been made from persecution to religious liberty but in the teeth of their most strenuous opposition; never have they suffered one particle of discussion in religion and politics which it was in their power to prevent; not a step has been taken with their good will for the diffusion of education. I speak of them as a body. They have never originated any one plan for spreading or improving it—and whatever plans have been prepared by others, from the Lancastrian and Infant Schools up to the University of London²⁴ they have, as a body, most violently opposed except that in most of these instances when they at last found that the thing would go on in spite of their opposition, they have, as the next best thing to preventing the improvement altogether, attempted to keep it in their own hands for sectarian purposes. As people would read, they might read the Bible and the Prayerbook: but as for reading the Bible without the Prayerbook, No, no, that was not to be endured. Their only doubt was whether the persons who proposed it were Atheists, Deists or Dissenters. The word of God was not fit to be read, unless that of man was administered along with it: and their account of what God said, or what in their opinion he should have said, was to be forced down the throats of babes and sucklings²⁵ avowedly on the ground that unless a belief in it were firmly fixed in the mind at an age previous to that at which the reasoning faculty begins to operate, in all probability the habit would never establish itself at all. But I have exceeded the time which I allowed myself for stating the grounds of my disapprobation of the church. I have stated them sufficiently for purposes of information. It was not my object to state them for purposes of argument—Here therefore I shall stop.

[1 ]John Arthur Roebuck.

[2 ]The opponent alluded to may be John Sterling (1806-44), who reported on 6 March, 1828, to his friend R.C. Trench on the London Debating Society: “I was going to be stoned with stones at Cambridge for being an enemy to religion, and now I am ground to powder by a Mill in London for excessive piety” (Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop: Letters and Memorials, ed. Maria Trench, 2 vols. [London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1888], Vol. I, p. 7).

[3 ]Richard Carlile (1790-1843), the most notorious free-thinker of the time, had served six years (1819-25) in Dorchester gaol for publishing blasphemous and seditious libels. He also published Neo-Malthusian pamphlets, including the one Mill had been arrested for distributing.

[4 ]In prosecutions after Carlile’s own arrest, his wife Jane, his sister Mary Ann, and many of their shopmen were indicted and convicted.

[5 ]Not identified, though this speaker, rather than the one previously mentioned, might be Sterling.

[6 ]Cf. Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751-1816), “Speech on Summing up the Evidence on the Second, or Begum Charge” (3, 6, 10, and 13 June, 1788), in Speeches, 5 vols. (London: Martin, 1816), Vol. II, p. 64.

[7 ]Robert Taylor (1784-1844), a Churchman converted to Deism, had been sentenced to one year’s imprisonment on 7 February, 1828, for blaspheming in a sermon preached in Salters’ Hall on 24 October, 1827. He had become friends with Richard Carlile and, starting on 15 February, 1828, wrote a weekly letter to Carlile’s Lion, a sixpenny weekly founded to record Taylor’s trial.

[8 ]John Atkins (ca. 1760-1838), a Tory merchant tailor, had been alderman of Walbrook Ward since 1808.

[9 ]Founded in 1802, the Society concerned itself mainly with prosecuting obscene and blasphemous publications, although it also, through vigilante methods, attempted to control prostitution. It had aristocratic, religious, and, it was said, governmental support.

[10 ]Founded in 1821 and collapsing within the year, the Constitutional Association for Opposing the Progress of Disloyal and Seditious Principles, often satirized by radicals as the “Mock-Constitutional Association” or the “Bridge Street Gang,” also instituted prosecutions against libellous publications. It too had support from aristocrats and churchmen.

[11 ]Cf. Edward Hyde (1609-74), 1st Earl of Clarendon, The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 2 vols. in 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1759), Vol. I, p. 34.

[a-a]L record [the word is difficult to read; TS has a gap; L, TS put the whole sentence in parentheses]

[b-b][text from second typescript]

[12 ]Reported in Emmanuel Augustin Dieudonné Marin Joseph, comte de Las Cases (1766-1842), Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. Journal of the Private Life and Conversation of the Emperor Napoleon at Saint Helena (1823), 8 pts. in 4 vols. (London: Colburn, 1823), Vol. III, p. 225 (19 Aug., 1816).

[13 ]Not identified.

[14 ]25 Charles II, c. 2 (1672); 30 Charles II, 2nd sess., c. 1 (1678); and 13 Charles II, 2nd sess., c. 1 (1661).

[15 ]Blackstone, Commentaries, Vol. IV, pp. 57-8.

[16 ]John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), The History of John Bull (1712), included in Jonathan Swift, Works, Vol. VI, pp. 233-407.

[17 ]Both 1 Elizabeth, c. 2 (1558), and 13 & 14 Charles II, c. 4 (1662), were “celebrated” Acts of Uniformity, though Mill is probably thinking of the latter, which modified the Book of Common Prayer and the forms of rituals and ceremonies.

[18 ]10 Anne, c. 2 (1711).

[19 ]For an example of screening the church, see David Hume, History of England (1756-62), 8 vols. (London: Cadell, et al., 1823), Vol. IV, p. 31. For Mill’s onslaught on Hume’s veracity as an historian, see CW, Vol. VI, pp. 3-58.

[c-c]L, TS power [the word is difficult to read]

[20 ]Not identified, although again Sterling is possibly intended.

[21 ]Not identified.

[22 ]1600-49; King from 1625 to 1649, when he was beheaded.

[23 ]There is a hiatus in the manuscript (TS agrees), with the text resuming on the next folio; we follow Laski in ignoring the apparent gap.

[24 ]Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838) towards the end of the eighteenth century developed a form of monitorial education, using the older children to educate the younger. Patronized by Whigs, especially Brougham, the Lancasterian Schools, adopted by the British and Foreign School Society, offered a Christian but non-sectarian education. Brougham, with Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Marquis of Lansdowne, founded the Infant School Society in 1824: Samuel Wilderspin (ca. 1792-1866) was appointed superintendent, and several schools were established, again non-sectarian. The University of London (which opened in 1828) was explicitly founded on a non-religious basis, especially for those excluded by religious views from Oxford and Cambridge; its founders included the omni-active Brougham, and James Mill served on its Council.

[25 ]Cf. Psalms, 8:2.