Aye! why, indeed, should we stultify, and almost brutalize ourselves, by admiring this or any other incarnation of the spirit of selfishness! If the Deontologist can really cure mankind of this base infatuation, he will, verily, almost persuade us to become Utilitarians. If we had our will, every ruler, every statesman, every Churchman, if the Deontologist pleases, every man, woman, and child in civilized countries, should be compelled to get the following passages by heart; even though ecclesiastics, (we hope, unjustly,) are involved in the censure: "It unfortunately happens, that the popular sanction as regards one of the great topics of human wretchedness is miserably immoral. Nothing can be worse than the general feeling on the subject of War. The church, the state, the ruling few, the subject many, all seem to have combined, in order to patronize vice and crime, in their very widest sphere of evil. Dress a man in particular garments, call him by a particular name, and he shall have authority on divers occasions to commit every species of offence; to pillage; to murder; to destroy human felicity; to maximize human suffering; and for so doing he shall be rewarded! "Of all that is pernicious in admiration, the admiration of heroes is the most pernicious; and how delusions should have made us admire what virtue should teach us to hate and loathe, is among the saddest evidences of human weakness and folly. The crimes of heroes seem lost in the vastness of the field they occupy. A lively idea of the mischief they do, of the misery they create, seldom penetrates the mind through the delusions with which thoughtlessness and falsehood have surrounded their names and deeds. Is it that the magnitude of the evil is too gigantic for entrance? We read of twenty thousand men killed in a battle, with no other feeling than that it was a glorious victory.' Twenty thousand, or ten thousand-what reck we of their miserable sufferings? The hosts who perish are the evidence of the completeness of the triumph; and the completeness of the triumph is the measure of merit and the glory of the conqueror. Our schoolmasters, and the immoral books they so often put into our hands, have inspired us with an affection for heroes; and the hero is more heroic, in proportion to the numbers of the slain. Add a cypher, not one iota is added to our disapprobation. Four, or two figures, give us no more sentiment of pain than one figure, while they add marvellously to the grandeur and splendour of the victor. Let us draw forth one individual from those thousands or tens of thousands: his leg has been shivered by one ball, his jaw broken by another; he is bathed in his own blood, and that of his fellows; yet he lives, tortured by thirst, fainting, famishing: he is but one of the twenty thousand, one of the actors and sufferers in the scene of the hero's glory,-and of the twenty thousand, there is scarcely one whose suffering or death will not be the centre of a circle of misery. Look again, admirer of that hero! Is not this wretchedness? Because it is repeated ten-ten hundred-ten thousand times, is not this wretchedness?"-vol. i. pp. 253-255. These are biting words! They can, of course, have no proper application to those true heroes, whose energy and genius are consecrated to the preservation of their country. But they are words which ought to put to shame the mighty hunters of men, and their frantic idolaters: and if they should succeed in exorcising the legionary demon, which, for four thousand years, has been tearing and maddening the world, again we say, that we might be strongly tempted to call ourselves by the name of Jeremy Bentham. But alas! we see but little prospect of our con version! The concluding chapter of the first volume of this work contains a history of the greatest-happiness-principle, which is entertaining enough. We close our article with the following extract, which relates the conversion of Mr. Bentham to that doctrine, with a garrulous simplicity which may amuse the reader, after the foregoing dry disquisition, wherewith he has been wearied, doubtless, almost to death: : "Dr. Priestley published his Essay on Government in 1768. He there introduced, in italics, as the only reasonable and proper object of government, 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number.' It was a great improvement upon the word utility. It represented the principal end, the capital, the characteristic ingredient. It took possession, by a single phrase, of every thing that had hitherto been done. It went, in fact, beyond all notions that had preceded it. It exhibited not only happiness, but it made that happiness diffusive; it associated it with the majority, with the many. Dr. Priestley's pamphlet was written, as most of his productions, currente calamo, hastily and earnestly. "Some how or other,' (to use the words taken from Mr. Bentham's lips, when he was talking over with the writer what he called the Adventures of the Greatest-Happiness Principle, its parentage, birth, education, travels, and history,') Somehow or other, shortly after its publication, a copy of this pamphlet found its way into the little circulating library belonging to a little coffee-house, called Harper's coffee-house, attached, as it were, to Queen's College, Oxford, and deriving, from the popularity of that college, the whole of its subsistence. It was a corner house, having one front towards the High Street, another towards a narrow lane, which on that side skirts Queen's College, and loses itself in a lane issuing from one of the gates of New College. To this library the subscription was a shilling a quarter, or, in the University phrase, a shilling a term. Of this subscription the produce was composed of two or three newspapers, with magazines one or two, and now and then a newly-published pamphlet; a moderate sized octavo was a rare, if ever exemplified spectacle: composed partly of pamphlets, partly of magazines, half-bound together, a few dozen volumes made up this library, which formed so curious a contrast with the Bodleian Library, and those of Christ's Church and All Souls.'" "The year 1768 was the latest of the years in which I ever made at Oxford a residence of more than a day or two. The motive of that visit was the giving my vote, in the quality of Master of Arts, for the University of Oxford, on the occasion of a parliamentary election; and not being at that time arrived at the age of twenty-one, this deficiency in the article of age might have given occasion to an election contest in the House of Commons, had not the majority been put out of doubt by a sufficient number of votes not exposed to contestation. This year, 1768, was the latest of all the years in which this pamphlet could have come into my hands. Be this as it may, it was by that pamphlet, and this phrase in it, that my principles on the subject of morality, public and private together, were determined. It was from that pamphlet and that page of it, that I drew the phrase, the words and import of which have been so widely diffused over the civilized world. At the sight of it, I cried out, as it were in an inward ecstacy, like Archimedes on the discovery of the fundamental principle of hydrostatics, Eupnka. Little did I think of the correction which, within a few years, on a closer scrutiny, I found myself under the necessity of applying to it."-vol. i. pp. 298-300. Here then, was the germ of the Utilitarian, or rather the felicity-maximizing school, which has since grown into such awful renown: a school, which has been regarded by some as a convocation of sages, endowed with all but superhuman sagacity and benevolence; by others, as little better than an outpost of Pandamonium; and which we-(though we almost tremble at our own temerity)—are, sometimes, strongly tempted to consider as, (with some exceptions), only a collection of rather self-conceited, wrongheaded, tolerably well-meaning, but not very well-informed men! ART. II. 1. A Primary Charge addressed to the Clergy of the Diocese of Barbados and the Leeward Islands, and delivered in the Islands of Barbados, Antigua, and St. Christopher, in 1830 and 1831. By the Right Rev. Wm. Hart Coleridge, D.D. Bishop of Barbados and the Leeward Islands. London. 1834. 4to. pp. 41. By 2. A Charge addressed to the Clergy of the Diocese of Barbados and the Leeward Islands, and delivered in the Islands of Barbados, Antigua, and St. Christopher, in the Year 1834. the Right Rev. William Hart Coleridge, D.D., Bishop of Barbados and the Leeward Islands. London. 1834. 4to. pp. 40. 3. An Address delivered in the City of Caracas, on the 26th February, 1834, at the Consecration of a Chapel and Burial Ground for the Interment of the Members of the English Church dying within that City. By the Right Rev. W. H. Coleridge, D. D., Bishop of Barbados and the Leeward Islands. Winchester. 8vo. pp. 20. 4. Report of the Incorporated Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction and Education of the Negro Slaves in the British West India Islands. 1833. London. 8vo. pp. 116. 5. Paul, Philemon, and Onesimus, or, Christian Brotherhood; being a Practical Exposition of St. Paul's Epistle to Philemon, applicable to the Present Crisis of West Indian Affairs: in a Discourse preached in St. John's Church, Antigua, on Sunday, December, 29, 1833. With an Appendix, containing Remarks on-1. Education of the Poor-2. Relief of the Destitute. By the Rev. Thomas Parry, M.A., Archdeacon of Antigua, in the Diocese of Barbados and the Leeward Islands; and late Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Rivingtons. London. 1834. 12mo. pp. 57. NOTWITHSTANDING the great and general interest which has been excited in this country with respect to its West Indian Coloniesan interest of which the reality and extent have been most unequivocally proved by the cost incurred for the abolition of colonial slavery-we are inclined to think that there still prevails great ignorance as to the real state (we mean of course the present state) of West Indian society, especially in regard to those most important points, Religion and Morals. That on such a subject some misconception should exist, is not at all to be wondered at; on the contrary, it is no more than what a thinking person would, from the nature of the case, expect. To a certain extent it is inevitable. Of countries so remote, and in many respects so unlike our own, it is almost impossible that those who have never witnessed anything similar, should form any just conceptions. The remark of the critic Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem, may be extended farther by the philosopher, who may safely maintain, that, in order to form a clear judgment of any subject which falls under the cognizance of the outward sense, ocular acquaintance, either with the subject itself, or with some subject similar to it, is indispensable. Our ideas in such cases, of what we have not seen, can be formed only by analogy, only in the mould of our existing ideas of what we have seen. By mere description it is scarcely possible to form a clear conception even of a sugarcane; how much less of the complex relations and circumstances of society in a country to which our personal experience furnishes little or nothing analogous. This natural difficulty, arising from the remoteness of the West Indies, and the difference of society there from what we are accustomed to in England, is multiplied almost a hundred-fold by NO. XXXII.-OCT. 1834. U a circumstance in a manner peculiar to the case before us. We allude to the suspicious incredulity, on the one hand, with which even good and sensible men receive any evidence, however authentic, in favour of the West Indies; and, on the other, to the morbid avidity with which they positively snatch at and devour every report, however vague, of cruelty, oppression and barbarity. We ourselves have known an instance, in which the statements of an individual, not likely from his character, nor under any temptation from his circumstances, to tell aught but the simple truth, have been received, even by his intimate friends, with some such remark as the following-" Oh! but you have been in the West Indies!”—as if, forsooth, he could have given any authentic testimony without having been there; or as if, the moment that he breathed the air of the colonies, he had inhaled a moral pestilence, and drawn into his blood the infection of cruelty and falsehood, of selfishness and impiety. Thus has party spirit,—not only, it is true, on one side; the friends of the planter have been led away by it as well as his enemies, but thus has the party spirit, generated by the long agitation of a question in every point of view momentous, led away the public mind from a dispassionate view of the subject, and caused the testimony of witnesses to be received continually with an ex parte feeling, disposed sometimes to magnify the virtues and blessings of the colonies, but for the most part to exaggerate all their evils into horrors, and all their faults into enormities. A further cause, which has contributed to the prevalence of error respecting the colonies, and especially respecting the state of religion there, is another kind of party spirit, different from that produced by the slave question, and quite independent of it; one which, we fear, will outlive the abolition of slavery, and continue to embarrass efforts for the improvement of the negroes, almost as much, if not more, than slavery itself did ;—we allude to party spirit in religion-a spirit, unhappily, not less destructive of candour than its kindred spirit in politics. From either is engendered that-vice, shall we call it? or does it deserve any gentler name?-which we understand the Apostle to mean by xaxоosia (Rom. i. 29; rendered, in our translation," malignity"); that illnatured proneness to view all the proceedings of those who differ from us in the worst light, to receive statements in their favour with suspicion, to misconstrue their actions and vilify their motives. We cannot but fear that this spirit has had much to do in darkening the West India question, and especially in disparaging the good which has of late years been effected, by God's blessing, through the labours of the clergy acting under episcopal direction and controul. That men, equally good men, should differ in re |