THE

CHRISTIAN REFORMER;

OR,

UNITARIAN

MAGAZINE AND REVIEW.

✓

NEW SERIES, VOL. II.

FROM JANUARY TO DECEMBER, 1846.

LONDON:

SHERWOOD, GILBERT, AND PIPER, 23, PATERNOSTER ROW;

AND

CHAPMAN, BROTHERS, 121, NEWGATE STREET.

1846. 1

We have transcribed below the titles of some publications which have recently appeared on the subject of the Parliamentary Grant to Protestant Dissenting Ministers in England and Wales. The first is an address of the Executive Committee of " the British Anti-State-Church Association," authenticated by the signatures of its three Secretaries, calling upon the Distributors of the Grant to relinquish their trust, and urging the Recipients to forego for the future all participation of the Bounty.

The publication of this Address drew from Dr. Pye Smith, one of the Distributors, the letter forming the second article, which has appeared, we believe, only in the columns of the Patriot. Dr. Smith enters briefly on a general defence of the grant, and vindicates himself and his associates in the trust against the reproaches of the Committee. The chief purpose, however, of the Letter is to controvert the position of the Address, that the grant is an endowment, and to maintain the correctness of the representation of the Trustees, that it is, in the strictest sense, a Charity, "honourable to the giver, to the distributors, and to the receivers." An endowment," Dr. Smith justly remarks, "is a conferring, by a donor, of lands, money, or the equivalent, upon a grantee, defined by personal and local description. But the grant in question has no setting forth of persons or places." He adds in conclusion: "The Parliament itself has not a moral right to withhold it. The nation, by its representatives, has taken the purchase-money, and if it were to refuse to pay the annuity purchased, it would be guilty of a criminal act. Again I say it is not an endowment, but a payment for value received."

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The third pamphlet professes to be a Reply of the Committee, to this Letter of Dr. Smith. But, beyond the title-page, it bears no mark of its official emanation and authority. It wants, especially, the signatures of the triumvirate of Secretaries, by which the first Address was ushered into the world and recommended to public attention. Were we to hazard a conjecture as to the cause of this singular omis

1. Address of the Executive Committee of the British Anti-State-Church Association to the Distributors and Recipients of the Parliamentary Grant to Protestant Dissenting Ministers in England and Wales. 12mo. 1845.

2. To the Executive Committee of the British Anti-State-Church Association, and to all others who object to the Regium Donum and Parliamentary Grant to Poor Dissenting Ministers. A Letter by Dr. J. P. Smith, inserted in the Patriot Newspaper, July 28, 1845.

3. Reply of the Committee of the British Anti-State-Church Association to Dr. Pye Smith. 12mo. 1845.

sion, we should be inclined to ascribe it to the repugnance of one of those functionaries, late a respected Trustee of the grant, whose retirement, according to his own public avowal, arose from no disapproval of its principle, to give the sanction of his name to a document so little courteous to his former associates.

On first glancing at the earlier pages of this tract, we felt disposed to augur favourably of the temper with which the writer was entering upon his controversial labour. We thought we could discern the opening of a vein of good-humour, which, if permitted to flow freely, might at once sweeten his own toils, and render less bitter the castigation he might administer to the objects of his censures. But our anticipations ended in disappointment. It soon became apparent that what we had mistaken for the harmless playfulness of wit, was but the affectation of pleasantry, assumed, probably, to secure the freer currency and impart the greater efficacy to the sarcasms of the hypercritic, to whose diseased vision every object appeared distorted, and who charged upon his adversaries inconsistencies and contradictions which had existence only in his own imagination. In the writer's estimation, the defenders of the grant have very confused notions of its nature, and whilst they maintain a tolerable agreement with one another, none of them are in agreement with themselves; and he illustrates his meaning by the enumeration of particular terms and phrases, employed by its advocates as descriptive of its character, which are, in his opinion, at variance and incompatible with one another. Now we scruple not to affirm that, to any considerate and candid reader, all those terms and phrases so captiously objected to, are, as they are applied, perfectly compatible and accurately descriptive; and that the terrific "dilemma," on the torturing horns of which he has so complacently fixed his adversaries, has no existence beyond his own excited and fertile fancy.

The aim of this writer, in the Reply, is to controvert the account of the grant published by the Trustees in their "Brief Statement," and repeated by Dr. Smith; and having succeeded, to his own satisfaction, in the accomplishment of his purpose, he calls in a tone of triumph upon both the Trustees and their beneficiaries to relinquish the boon, as no longer capable of justification or defence.

The Trustees represent their case to be-That the grant is one of pure charity, bestowed from no political feeling, and contemplating no political object; and that it is in no respect a fund created by the compulsory taxation of the people for the maintenance of any system of Christian worship.

The former point they deem to be sufficiently proved by what is known of the origin of the grant; and the latter they hold to be fully established by historical evidence relating to the fund out of which it has usually been bestowed; because, during the reigns of George I. and George II., the money was paid out of the Privy Purse, from the hereditary revenues of the Crown,-a fund, in a great measure, at the disposal of the Sovereign; that on the accession of George III., the King having relinquished the hereditary revenues for a fixed civil list, this grant, in common with the other permanent Royal Charities, was made payable out of that fund from which the Privy Purse was then provided; that in 1804, the civil list was relieved of the payment of these charities, which thenceforth were provided for by an annual vote