A LETTER TO THE HIERARCHY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Against the Union of small Benefices. IN FAVOUR OF THE DIVISION OF LARGE BENEFICES. To the Most Reverend the Archbishops and Bishops of that part of the Church of Christ, called the Church of England. FATHERS IN GOD, IN begging permission to address your lordships respecting the commission issued some months ago, and by this time probably dissolved, preparatory to the Union of Benefices, I approach you as a son, desiring to maintain inviolate every obligation which duty and respect impose upon me in this relation, and at the same time hoping to receive in return, that confidence and consideration which it ought to impart. When a father is about to rob or injure a strictly entailed estate, and by any means is about to obtain an Act of Parliament to legalize his proceedings, I conceive it to be no other than an imperative act of duty in his son to defend the grandchild's claim; and if those, who have the advantage of primogeniture, do from the absence of issue, or feelings of fear, apathy, or false delicacy, consent to let the matter pass unnoticed, it by no means annuls the right of the younger branches of the family to whose posterity the property is intended to descend. Great, therefore, as is my regret to find myself diametrically opposed to any measure, which your lordships imagine, to the advantage of the entailed estate, in which we all share a life-interest, yet as you, fathers and heads of the family, are, in attempting to alter the entail,-acting contrary to the will of the testators from whom we have derived it,-contrary to laws which have brought it safe from generation to generation,—and contrary to the laws on whose stability alone the possessions of all Britons are secure, I shall not feign a diffidence on |