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Secondly, they take usury; that is to say, they let out their money for hire, to those who think it worth while to take it in. And why not money, as well as a newspaper? Is there any thing more degrading in a man's letting out the use of his money for payment, than in writing a newspaper for payment? Where is the proof, that one way of deriving advantage from a man's industry is discreditable, and the other is not? must be highly consolatory to those who have reason for apprehension from some parts of the author's political course, to see that he is still groping among such beggarly elements, as trying to raise an outcry against men's not giving the use of their property for nothing. Does the author of the Register give his Register for nothing? Will he lend a good half of his flourishing plantation-ground, hoping for nothing thereby? And if not, why should not there be a law to pelt him, and a special act to prevent him from sitting in the House of Commons?

When a European vessel is wrecked on the coast of Barbary, the survivors are divided among the captors, and immediately engaged in such servile offices as they are fit for. On one occasion an unhappy man of letters was found to have been employed in sitting on eggs to hatch them. If the author of the sermon on Good Friday, were made to hatch eggs by a Mussulman, he would learn how bitter and absurd a thing religious persecution seems when the suffering is reversed. How speedily would better views introduce themselves into his mind, how rapidly would his prejudices be mollified, his hatred ooze away, and his unlovely passions sink into repose, if he were introduced for one three weeks (or four, if the eggs were duck's) into this downy seat of meditation and remorse. Marius on the ruins of Carthage would hardly be a more striking subject for a painter, or a more useful for a moralist.

Think only of the author of a newspaper at the present time of day, canting like a bishop, about "a neighbouring nation "plunged into all the terrors of anarchy," and quoting St. Gregory to prove taking interest to be "felony and parricide.' What can have led any sensible man, to mount on a dead horse like this? The appeal might once have been dangerous; but he must have sadly miscalculated if he did not know, that all possibility of blowing up a spark of danger on such grounds, had long since gone out.

Tertio, that the Kentucky men, a great authority, have driven six Jews from Louisville, by virtue of the intuitive faculty by which a Kentucky man sees into the deficiencies of the laws. Remains to be known, whether this proves any thing but that

the Kentucky men were in their debt. For be it noted, there is not the slightest pretence of proving that they amassed property by unlawful methods, or by methods which were not just as open to every christian Kentucky man as to themselves. But their sin was, that they amassed property; and the sin of the Jews in Europe is the same. Petitions upon petitions come forward, declaring that they are as true and just in their dealings as any other order of citizens. But they amass property, and therefore the author of the sermon on Good Friday cannot abide them. To balance the story from Kentucky, it should at least have been stated that the West Indian legislatures, not generally supposed to labour under any mania of liberality, or any strong degree of blindness to their own immediate interests, were at the same moment removing disabilities from the Jews. The conclusion is simple; in the West Indies it is the custom for men to pay their debts, in Kentucky not.

Lastly, it appears that when the author of the Register was a very little boy,' the house of a Mrs. Hutchins, a widow, who occupied a farm and gardens at Chelsea,' was broken open by Jews, who went to the house in the night, forced the door open by means of a screw or jack (a thing beyond the genius of Christian diplomacy), and robbed the house of every thing valuable, and murdered the servant man with circumstances of great barbarity. Whereupon the author is surprised, that Mr. Hutchins of Chelsea, who is believed to be the son of the Mrs. Hutchins above mentioned, does not petition the House of Commons against the Jews. For which the best reason that can apparently be given, is that Mr. Hutchins is not disposed to prove himself such a simpleton.

Nevertheless, the author of the sermon does not call upon Christians "to destroy them;"-how charitable! He does not exhort them" to hunt them from the land like beasts of prey;" -how considerate! He only wishes that Christians would not be so blasphemous as to allow them an equality of laws. He does not call out for burning them, for burning days are gone; but he sees a certain chance of struggling to inflict on them some minor kind of martyrdom, and he preaches at it with the vigour of a capuchin and the keenness of the Holy Office. And after all, what authority have Christians for inflicting legal disabilities on Jews, on account of any thing they or their forefathers may have done? The sufferer on whose account all this violence is pretended to be got up, died exclaiming, Father forgive them; for they know not what they do.'-'Never for 'give them,' says the author of the sermon, for they knew very 'well what they did; and their posterity knew too.".

So far for the question of moral propriety; next, for that of theological. Christians believe that an individual in human form in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, gave evidence by miraculous performances of his being sent of God. Large masses of mankind, both in the countries where the performances are stated to have taken place and in others,—at the time stated for the performance, and all subsequent periods,have agreed in the belief that the statement is correct in all its parts, and vast superstructures of temporal and spiritual power have been raised thereupon. In the midst of this is found a sect of men, who say (and nobody denies it) that they are the lineal descendants of the inhabitants of those countries, and though it is certain that numbers of their countrymen at the time gave in their accession to the reality of the facts in question, they are the descendants of the portion that did not. They raise no doubt on the fact, that an individual who declared himself, or was declared by others, to be in some manner the King of the Jews, and who added thereto, by the avowal of his own followers, a system of energetic attack on the established hierarchy of the country,-was (as has happened to a majority of reformers in every age, and as would be exceedingly likely to happen in many places in the present age) put to a violent death by the influence of those who had strong interest in putting down his alterations or reforms. They have no motive for denying, that he was put to death under circumstances of the highest suffering and contumely that could be applied by the execution or perversion of the existing law; and they make no show of maintaining, that the mode of execution was not barbarous, ferocious, and disgraceful, in as high degree as in the case of any other laws of barbarous ages. But, setting all this on one side, they appear here as the representatives of those who were upon the spot and did not see cause for coming to the same conclusions as the Christians. And hereupon bursts out a demand, to pelt them, to treat them as ⚫ inanimate substances,' to rise upon them as a body, and drive 'them out of the territory. Though they creep into holes and corners with their religion, they are insolent ruffians, who 'mock at the religion and morality of Christians.' To the truth now, there is nothing like the truth,- did ever any man, woman, or child, hear a Jew mock? Let proclamation be made at St. Paul's, let a reward be offered for any living creature that will come forward and prove, that he ever heard a Jew mock; and let it be settled once for all, whether this is truth or calumny. Their ceremonies, though avowed by Christians to have been instituted by the immediate command of God, are declared by

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the same man that professes an outrageous Christianity, to be such as it is infamy to call religious.' They are moreover filthy;'-they wear a wrong coat, or they stink. All the persecuted stink. One of the first receipts for having a man persecuted, is to impugn the credit of his corporal presence. But what does it all come to, but that there is a certain caste of believers among the Christians, who wish the Jews were at the devil? What inference would be drawn from the fact, if the case were reversed,—and if it was the Christians that were to be put out of the pale of society, because they gave evidence of a belief hostile to the tenets of the Jews. Ages ago, (and the sermon would have been in its right place, if it had been found in a mummy-case), such policy might have been of use. But who will look abroad into the world as it stands at the present moment, and view all they see there with reference only to its existence, and not to whether they are pleased with its existence or the contrary, and then say there is any policy just now, in getting up a hubbub for the suppression of men of an opposite belief?

And this leads to the broad statement of the proposition,-That men do not form civil societies, for the maintenance of any form of religious opinions, but for purposes common to all and antecedent to all;-and that consequently all attempts to found any civil superiority or inferiority upon religious belief, are simply attempts to defraud and rob; and are to be resisted, like other attempts at fraud and robbery, by the good sense of the community informing them, that the injury is not done to the sufferer only, but to the whole. Why is not X. Y. Z. knocked down and robbed at Charing Cross;-when it is palpable upon inspection,—when it is clear beyond all possibility of helping it by demonstration,— that no other human being, can by any the remotest possibility, henceforth or at any imaginable period, be X. Y. Z.? Is it clearer or so clear, that the member for the University of Oxford will never be a Jew? Or is it practicable to imagine a more perfect exemption from all chance of being made to exchange personalities with the sufferer? Why then does the sovereign people, in the exercise of its popular good-will and pleasure, determine that X. Y. Z. shall not be knocked down and robbed at Charing Cross,-even though to wearing an unfashionable garment, he should add the crime of selling oranges, and be strongly suspected of having lost a joint of his little finger, though he keeps it carefully invested in his small-clothes? Why, in the name of common sense, but because every lout-that is not a thief;-every way-faring man that is not a picker up of unconsidered trifles by nature and by VOL. XIII.-Westminster Review.

practice ;-knows that if X. Y. Z. comes to any harm, there is not a combination of letters in the alphabet that is not likely to have its turn. Equality upon such points, is the first principle of popular justice. It isne QUIS fur, without any exception in favour of religious creeds; and if the people's betters do not think so too, it is only because their betters are under circumstances of peculiar difficulty and temptation, which the people should make allowances for, when the question is of allowing them to have their own way. But as long as there is any disposition to thrust forward some particular set of individuals, as those who may properly be cut off from common right, as long as there has not been obtained a full, total, and all-comprehensive assurance, that no case of exception, on any pretence or for any reason, does or can exist,-just so long is every man, who has the sense to see a danger before it strikes against his nose, bound to make common cause with the forlorn hope of the persecuted, whoever they may be. If it is safe to doubt the divine procession of bishops,-if a man who hesitates upon that point can lie quietly in bed without being roused by a dragoon, it is only because a certain progress has been made in declaring that religious opinion in general shall be free; and in exact proportion to that progress, is the safety of the slumbering mis-believer in the first degree. If he is safe at all, it is only because somebody has gone and bivouacked beyond him. It matters not what difference of garb, or food, or faith, may separate the clans that meet for the settling of the great contest. It matters not how little one ally may love another quoad his own private use and edification. But there is a great fight to fight; and the man must be a fool or an idiot, who will quarrel with the cut of his neighbour's beard, when the question is whether men's thoughts shall be safe, or whether society shall be one great border fray, where he shall eat whom strength and a long sword enable to cater for himself. A government that has been foolish enough to decline doing justice to a portion of its subjects because they were few, must be shown that the interested are not few. It is not the question of the twenty-seven thousand, but of the fourteen millions; and in a less especial manner of the whole twenty-two millions besides. A compact must be made against such a principle, like what exists against other forms of evil; and if John Nokes is injured, proceedings must lie, not in the name of John Nokes, but of the commonwealth.

But what is to be done with a writer, who condescends to stir popular prejudice against vaccination because it is beastly. Roast beef is beastly; the only excuse for eating it, is that it is salutary