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ERRONEOUS EXTREMES.

FROM DR. CHALMERS'

DISCOURSES ON THE APPLI

COMMERCIAL

CATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO THE
AND ORDINARY AFFAIRS OF LIFE.'

THERE are two opposite directions in which we have to witness what may be called an ultra or extreme politics. One of these extremes is now getting fast obsolete, at least in Scotland: for in our sister country there is still an inveteracy about it, which may not give way for perhaps one or two generations. To picture it forth most effectually, we might seize in imagination upon some one individual by whom it is realized. Who, frank, and generous, and kind-hearted, in all the relations of private society, yet, on every question of public or parliamentary warfare, shows all the fiercest antipathies of high and antiquated cavaliership:—who, merciful and munificent, in all his dealings with his own people, yet eyes a boding mischief in every new and advancing movement by the people of the land; who deems it perhaps one of the glories of old England to have a jovial and well-fed peasantry, yet would feel the education of them to be a raising of them out of their places, and so a disturbance of the sober and settled orthodoxy of other days: who fears a lurking sectarianism in this active and widely-diffused scholarship, that might afterwards

break forth into outrage on England's venerated throne, and her noble hierarchy; and therefore would vastly rather than this age of philanthropic restlessness, have the age brought back again, when pastime and holiday, and withal a veneration for church had full ascendant over the hearts and habits of a then unlettered population. Still in many of England's princely halls, in many a baronial residence, there exists a feeling that her golden time has passed away, and that this new device of a popular education is among the deadliest of the destroyers. High in loyalty, and devoted by all the influences of sentiment and ancestry, and sworn partisanship to the prerogatives of monarchy, they honour the king; but, overlooking the intellect, and the capacity, and the immortal nature that reside even in the meanest of his subjects, and so regardless as they are of the still higher prerogatives of mind, they do not, and they know not how to honour all men.

But in counterpart to this, there is another extreme that to our taste is greatly more offensive than the former, when the cause of education is vilified by mixing up with it in the meantime, that accursed thing which education at length will utterly exterminate, when a mechanic school is made the vehicle of an outrageous disaffection to all authority, and a mechanic publication breathes the fierceness of radicalism throughout all its pages; when one cannot in any way devise, either for the religion or the science of our lower orders, but this unclean spirit must insinuate and turn it all to loathsomeness; and every honest effort to obtain a more enlightened peasantry is either paralyzed or poisoned, by the obtruded alliance of men, who bear no other regard

to the people than as the instruments of some great public or political overthrow. Still it vouches nobly for the good of a people's scholarship, that this abuse is chiefly exemplified in that land where they are just merging from ignorance, and that in our own more lettered country it is comparatively unknown; that it is there and not here, where this cause has been seized upon by demagogues, who, while they would flatter the multitude into the belief that they honour all men, give full manifestation by all their writings and their ways that they do not honour the king.

It is in such conflicts of human passion and human party, that Christianity comes forth in the meekness of wisdom, and points out to us the more excellent way. It unites loyalty to the king, with love, nay reverence for the very humblest of his subject population; and can both do homage to the dignity of office that sits upon the one, and to those exalted capacities, both of worth and of intellect which lie in wide and wealthy diffusion through the other. There is nought of the pusillanimous in its devotion to the crown, and nought of the factious and the turbulent in the descents which it makes among the common people. We have felt that glow which the presence of a monarch can awaken, when, instead of the crouching servility of bondsmen, we are conscious of nothing but the generous and high-minded enthusiasm of gallant chivalry. And equal to this is the pure and philanthropic triumph which the spectacle of a beggar's school is fitted to awaken, when, instead of a fiery sedition lighted up in the heart and rankling its mischievous fermentations there, the mind indulges in the soothing perspective of that

brighter day, when the whole community of our empire shall be moulded into a harmonious and wellordered family. To call forth the energies of the popular mind by the power of a high education being made to bear upon it, will most surely add to the stability of the throne, while it must serve to lift and embellish the whole platform of society. It will speed the progress of the species, but not along a track of revolutionary violence. The moral perfectibility of the infidel may call for the demolition, both of altars and thrones; but the operations of the Christian philanthropist leave the fabric of our civil polity untouched; and, in that millenium after which he aspires, he sees kings to be the nursing fathers and queens the nursing mothers of our Zion. He has no fellowship, either with those who would revile the monarch, or who would refuse to enlighten the people; and though fired with the hopes of some great and coming enlargements, he founds them on the prophecies of a book, whose precepts within the utterance of one breath, and placed together in the same text, are, to honour the king, and to honour all

men.

ANTICIPATIONS.

THE happiness of the world to come, far from being of another species and complexion to that which we are here capable of tasting, is described to us in the word of God by every image most naturally attractive to the human mind; for it has been well observed that the desires and faculties of our nature are good in themselves, and are only evil when misapplied. The love of power is not ambition, of wealth avarice, nor of honour pride, when valued as instruments for conveying blessedness to others, and of glorifying him from whom they all proceed.

If the kingdom and dominion, and greatness, under the whole heaven, eternal rule and universal empire, if the possession of a body, glorious, heavenly, and incorruptible, are things which man must cease to be man before he can entirely disregard, then might he who wept for more worlds to conquer, find in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and in that alone, promises large enough to satisfy, and indeed to exceed, his utmost expectations. True wisdom and soundness of reason are thus identified with the Christian religion, which can alone furnish mankind with reasonable and solid grounds for the exercise of patience and self-denial. All are willing to part with a transitory and uncertain good, for the sake of one permanent advantage. All are too much enamoured with even a phantom of happiness, to

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