victories! This is the great moral victory to be obtained before any society can settle down into peace, welfare, and happiness:—the best use that can be made of the Church. It is a subject of the deepest interest; it requires grave consideration; I pray that it may have that consideration. I pray that I may be heard by a Commission, in grave consideration of that subject of the deepest interest, before any legislative change be entered upon. I put myself forward in this letter. Many will be the schemes proposed to your consideration: let mine be one, and then select and improve the best.

The first consideration is—What is now the Church? What are its defects? What the cause of that dissent, which has made a revision necessary?

The second consideration will be—What ought the Church to be, so as to leave no ground and reason of dissent? To some minds, the fickleness and fallibility of human nature will appear as an insurmountable obstacle to the construction of such a Church. I see farther and will propose in order.

I flatter myself that I am writing this letter with very proper feelings toward all institutions and all persons. I suspend, pro tem., all quarrels that I have with all men, to assist you in this common good, in which you deserve and will have, in the ratio of their goodness, the assistance of all good men. If I can sink the past in oblivion for common good, who should say he cannot? To the altar and shrine of that Reformed Church, which you contemplate, I have sacrificed property much—all I had, and years of liberty many. I am still worshipping, still so sacrificing, both property and personal liberty, and will so continue to the end. I say it not boastfully; but in comparative claim to attention, and in encouragement and example of union to assist you in the performance of your present promise.

Let me be permitted to say, too, that the Church is a subject which I have studied in its origin, its history, its first principle, all its dissent or variation from that first principle, down to its present standing. I have so studied it, that I cannot now find author or preacher who can present me any thing new as to its general merits, past or present. This is the chief ground on which I solicit your and the public attention to my view of this subject of Church Reform. I presume to know what the Church is, and what it ought to be.

It may be taken as a point to be yielded by all parties, that the desire with regard to the Law Established Church is, the removal of all ground of dissent, so as not to leave it a mere sectarian Church, which any mere abatement of existing dissenting objections will do. No Dissenter can complain, if the ground of his dissent be removed from the Church. And if there be no ground of future dissent left, there can be no future complaint, no new dissension arising. Without the absence of the possibility of dissent, there can be no just holding and application of a public and common property for the business of the Church. With that absence, the property is justly held and applied. Any law that recognizes and tolerates the Dissenter, recognizes and tolerates the justness of his dissent, and calls for the primary justice of removing the ground of dissent. No man can reasonably say, let us not be of one Church; but every man can reasonably say, let the Church be purified of its errors; and while any man can show an error, it is his duty to call for the purification, and the duty of authorities to attend to his call and to purify. A permanent Church then must be an improving, self-purifying Church, and continue a true picture of the best state of the human mind, meeting every well-founded and majority-decided call upon its utility.

Any idea of keeping up a Law Established Church with public property, surrounded by Dissenting Churches, without a public property, can enter the head of no man who understands the subject. There can be no peace or final settlement under such an arrangement. The effect to be accomplished is, not to break up the Church Property; but to break up the Dissenters from the Church. This will startle the present state of mind and feeling. I propose no abridgement of equal liberty. Is not this the grand desideratum? Can it be accomplished?—I think it can, and so proceed to unfold the two-fold consideration.

First.—What is now the Church? What are its defects? What the cause of that dissent which has made a revision necessary?

This, in reality, is but one question, with a three-fold expression.

The Church is now the Theatre of the Drama of the Books of Common Prayer, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Old and New Testament; to which is generally added a sermonic epilogue or exhortation, commonly called a Sermon.

Be not offended at my use of the word Theatre here: no other would substitute. Its root is the Greek [———], God, and signified originally, the house, place or stage, where the Drama of Theism or attributes of Deity were exhibited. The word is now much distorted from its root, in being made to describe the place of modern dramatic performances.

Nor must the word Drama be objected to; because the ceremony of the Church was originally so constructed, so meant, and so practised, as I will prove in the course of this letter.

Even the word Tragedy has its root in the Greek word [———], a goat, and signifies, in the dramatic exhibition of Theism, the death of the year, under the form of a personification, in the twelfth or zodiacal month of the goat. So that the death sorrowed for and lamented, was, dramatically, the apparent death of the sun, the death of the year, in the sign or month of the goat; and on St. Thomas's day, as we read in the Prophet Ezekiel, chap. viii. v. 14—"and behold there sat women weeping for Tammuz;" and v. 16—"about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east," which is no other than a representation of the performance of the tragedy, in which the performers had lost the moral of the Lord's Temple: precisely the present state and condition of the Church. All ancient mythology is in harmony with this conclusion; and the Christian tragedy is only a continued version, uniting the general drama of human morals with the annual tragedy of solar physics, and forming a two-fold or two-keyed allegory or mystery, physical and moral, as it was known even in the Celtic or Druid Church. Christianity was never new, or young, in this country, by existing records.

There are not many persons in this secret, perhaps, not even you, the first Minister of the country; so it will be deemed too abstruse and mystical on which to find a warrant for legislation or change of law: but I strenuously maintain, that such was the origin of the Christian Church, and such is now its generally lost meaning. The proof of the solar part of the allegory is not so much to my present purpose as the proof of the general drama of human morals being the basis of the present mystery of the Christian Church.

To stay a growing difficulty, we must go to the root:—it will grow again, if we do not go to the root. It will be so with the present Church, and all attempts to reform it.

In plainer language, then, I will describe the existing Church, as having, in its ceremonies and business, the mystery of the Christian Religion, without its revelation; that all the defects and all the grounds of dissent from it are the absence of the revelation, or want of knowing the meaning of the mystery. Whatever are called its doctrines, are all mysterious; its discipline is equally mysterious, and by its present ministers, unaccountable. Dissenters have dissented without being able to assign a reason for their dissent, and have set up for themselves something equally mysterious and unaccountable; and so the whole principle and practice of Religion in the country is in confusion and conflict; and no measure can reconcile the